[imglorp]

It saddens me with a survivor in my family that the primary therapies are still cut, burn, and poison. They are horrific to experience and just slightly better than the disease.

There are so many biological cures on the horizon; they can't arrive fast enough.

[oofbey]

What I find really sad is how slowly this science moves. As I read the article, the “a ha!” breakthrough was in the 1990s. Why did it take them 15-20 years to publish anything??? Coming from the tech industry this is mind boggling.

If you thought there was even a chance you were sitting on a realization that could literally “cure cancer” wouldn’t you want to scream it from the rooftops as loud and fast as possible?

[pas]

every researcher who believes in their idea shouts (to grant organizations) that their thing is the best. but gathering actual data is difficult.

usually research is super inefficient, academia is full of people who are ... true believers. (sometimes only in their own greatness, and that leads to fraud.) which is amazing, but it's not really conductive to figuring out what's the best way to set up a high-throughput process to generate data.

in many cases it would require them to stop most of what they do and let a specialist team build said pipeline for them. (but that runs into cost problems. and that immediately leads us back to the grant organizations allocating resources.)

for example see how many problems the paper from 2014 had: https://pubpeer.com/publications/A32D7989007655CBF8D9DB2A250...

also see how fiendishly difficult it was initially to create transgenic mice embryos: https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/167092138/prerequisites-dex...

and just an anecdote, I have a friend who worked at a brain research group (they implanted electrodes into rodents, put them into mazes, and then see whether they dream about the maze) and ... it was cool, but IMHO that public money was mostly wasted.