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by anonymouskimmer 926 days ago
> If there are already viable full-cure treatments for all those cancers then why aren't there viable full-cure treatments for this sort of bioweapon?

Plenty of possibilities. A cancer is ultimately a mutated genome in a viable cell gone awry. Even with contagious cancers (like the one killing the Tasmanian Devils) you're still ultimately dealing with an infectious eukaryotic cell of basically the same species type as the organism, and our mammalian immune systems are already used to targeting our own cells gone awry. Viruses, satellite viruses, prokaryotes, other eukaryotes, edited out, and whatever I'm forgetting will require a diversity of approaches (unless someone invents pico-scale teleportation).

1 comments

The premise of this bioweapon is that it can target the specific DNA of the target person or subpopulation.

Anything which can do that can target the mutated genome of a cancer in a human.

> of basically the same species type as the organism

Which means you will not be able to target a single person or subpopulation, because they are all the same species type.

I don't disagree with what you're saying I'm just saying that the skunkworkers may not care about one method of treating their family members if other methods exist and work well.
We don't have even one method and we have many Nobel prizes to go until we get one, so I again state this is all science fantasy only fit for a movie or other fictional story.