[hinterlands]

I think there's a fundamental disconnect here: the article says that you should be focusing on strategies that, for the most part, make aging more dignified. The goal shouldn't be even curing cancer. And maybe that's right.

But the reason billions of dollars are poured by SFBA VCs into aging research is probably just that they're getting older, they don't want to die, and they figure that they can put some of their money into anti-aging moonshots. It's not really different from rich people getting cryogenically frozen. If you have more money than you can possibly use, why wouldn't you try?

[spandrew]

It isn't right. Curing cancer is a noble pursuit.

And researchers on planet earth aren't a monolith. Even "longevity" research can take vastly different shapes across the labs driving towards it. The mess of research towards a goal is kinda the point; nobody knows where the universe hid the nuggets of world-bending discoveries. It's not quite pray and spray; but the shapes are diverse and irregular by design.

Cancer, alzheimers, cell senescence — all of it's fair game. Why are we pretending like anybody knows how to police this thought work?

[rhet0rica]

Here is the hottest of takes for you: curing cancer is not, in practice, entirely noble.

1. It is partially self-inflicted. Fallout from nuclear incidents, particularly in the US (testing in Nevada) and northern Europe (Chernobyl), is still a measurable contributor to cancer rates. Its prominence in medicine after the middle of the 20th century reflects these self-inflicted injuries from the Cold War. Likewise there are numerous cases of regulatory capture and corporate dishonesty resulting in cohorts who have suffered from carcinogenic chemicals like nicotine, glyphosate, and teflon. Nevertheless, heart disease has now overtaken it as the leading cause of death in the US. The further away you get from the US, the rarer it is as a cause of death.

2. The label is nearly meaningless in public funding. So much money has been poured into cancer research that other lines of biology have adapted by contorting their mission statements into tangentially cancer-related programs. Want to study how neurons develop in nematodes? Too bad—there's no money for that. But make up some BS about how it's a model organism for studying the spread of neuroblastomas, and you've successfully perverted the grant process into supporting research that the bean-counters tried to starve. This verges on fraud, even though no one wants to talk about it because the starved areas of research are usually areas of fundamental science that are highly regarded by other biologists.

3. The sheer abundance of charitable organizations handing out money to cancer-related causes results in a lot of science, much of it low-quality or poorly-vetted. In grad school I had an entire seminar class that consisted of, "here's a novel ML method applying SVMs to detecting disease; let's talk about it" and at least half of the randomly-selected papers promising significant results had blatant reproducibility problems like overfitting or bad methodology. These papers are easily published because they can be shat out in some generalist journal that tangentially touches on the relevant subject but does not have the editorial expertise to analyze the math involved. Retraction counts always follow hot topics, and the gross intersection of emotionally-motivated funders, siloed reviewers, and fame-chasing has ensured cancer research regularly produces too much low-end material to ever hope to check it all for reproducibility.

[cpgxiii]

> It is partially self-inflicted. Fallout from nuclear incidents, particularly in the US (testing in Nevada) and northern Europe (Chernobyl), is still a measurable contributor to cancer rates.

Other industrial/chemical exposures yes, but this almost certainly isn't it. Outside of specific significant exposures, estimating cancer rates from radiation exposure is just statistical garbage. Anything at the low exposure end relies on the bottom of the linear no-threshold (LNT) model where the model is known to be wrong. (LNT is useful for public policy - you should seek to minimize the exposure from any industrial processes and materials to zero - but it is bad for public health in telling people that any exposure increases their cancer risk.)

[godelski]

Sounds like you might know this but I'll add it for the public dialogue.

LNT is useful because you work with an abundance of caution when it comes to radiation. It's difficult to know what type of radiation someone received and where. Both of these can dramatically change the risk of exposure. It's not hard to measure in a lab, but an accident isn't a lab and you can't just go placing sensors all over every radiation worker's body (at least yet. Small sensors embedded in clothing would change this).

So what do you do? You purposefully over estimate. Because if your estimate is wrong, the human is much more likely to survive if you incorrectly assumed they received more than they actually did than if you error by assuming they got less than they actually did. Failure analysis is a critical part to any engineering or safety plan.

Why not over estimate as much when higher dosages are received? Well that's because it matters a lot less. As dosage increases all those nuances of where and what type matter less (they still matter).

It's still all highly complex and what I'll say is that if you haven't spent at least a year studying this stuff you're more under water than you think. It's great that there's a lot of educational material out there but unfortunately when it comes to complex topics like nuclear many of them do more harm than good. Pro nuclear armchair experts tend to be as uninformed as anti nuclear armchair experts. So like the LNT, it is always good to work with an abundance of caution. Especially when talking about complex subjects on the internet

[privatelypublic]

I wonder how often people don't understand how radiation affects health- because nominal levels don't hit the news. but, oh boy, when a single Fukushima isotope decay is detected on the coast of California- its national news.

[godelski]

We're really good at detecting radiation. Like REALLY good. It's because we spent a lot of money during the Cold War trying to detect nuclear materials. This includes underground weapons testing, being able to detect underground nuclear signatures via satellites, and even very trace amounts on people's clothing because it can help detect spies. It then was found that these things could be used for tons of stuff, such as tracking not spies lol.

But seriously, we can detect levels thousands of times lower than what's dangerous. You can even get pretty good dosimiters for like $100 these days

[Gormo]

In terms of your first point, I'm not sure I understand how the overall cancer rate being increased by dubious activities on the part of some people implies that efforts to cure cancer on the part of others are "not entirely noble". On the surface, this seems like a non-sequitur -- could you explain your reasoning further?

[saghm]

> It is partially self-inflicted. Fallout from nuclear incidents, particularly in the US (testing in Nevada) and northern Europe (Chernobyl), is still a measurable contributor to cancer rates. Its prominence in medicine after the middle of the 20th century reflects these self-inflicted injuries from the Cold War. Likewise there are numerous cases of regulatory capture and corporate dishonesty resulting in cohorts who have suffered from carcinogenic chemicals like nicotine, glyphosate, and teflon. Nevertheless, heart disease has now overtaken it as the leading cause of death in the US. The further away you get from the US, the rarer it is as a cause of death.

You have an interesting definition of "self-inflicted". I'd argue that most of the people getting cancer from the effects you mention were not the ones causing it, and presumably plenty of the researchers weren't either. I'm not convinced it's reasonable to abstract entire countries over a number of decades when judging the ethics of something like this

[hoseja]

>a measurable contributor to cancer rates

Source: greenpiss?

Hormesis is more likely.

[nick__m]

Radon, a perfectly natural source of radiation, cause more cancer than all the other nuclear sources combined. Stop it with the nuclear fear mongering!

[tzs]

It would be interesting if one of those anti-aging moonshots succeeds but the treatment to stop aging only works if you had a pre-treatment that has to occur before puberty.

[Alive-in-2025]

Or let's say you need to harvest organs from healthier people. Pro death penalty? The sci fi book writes itself.

[jjk166]

I'd pay a fortune for eternal youth for my kids or grandkids. Kids are the most expensive investment most people will ever make, this seems like a no brainer.

By comparison, a vaccine to prevent polio did little to help the many people who were already afflicted with it, and we never did develop a cure, but at this point the disease is nearly eradicated and there is little need for a cure. It would be cool if someone came up with a cure, but resources should logically keep being focused towards vaccinating the last of the vulnerable.

[tylerflick]

Because growing old is a privilege denied to many. Maybe focus on the kids first?

[rozap]

Yes the VC class is famously very good at practicing empathy towards their fellow humans.

[yard2010]

"The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. So, I think, you know, empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot."

He is wrong though.

[jjk166]

Child mortality rates are lower than they have ever been. They are basically zero in the developed world, and falling quickly throughout the developing world already. It's mostly a solved problem. Where it remains high, it's typically a symptom of other problems which prevent people from accessing adequate food and medicine. These circumstances almost always have their unique nuances that prevent them from being simply addressed by a single large effort, instead demanding a unique response informed by experience with the local conditions.

Adding a single healthy year of life to every American who lives to be over 70 would add about twice as many healthy person-years than reducing the US infant mortality rate to zero. Reducing the world infant mortality rate to zero would be equivalent to adding roughly two healthy years to the lifespans of those who make it over 70.