Cancer cure found possibly - links

Started by
7 comments, last by najmuddin 11 years, 4 months ago
Story about a 17 year old's discovery.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/15/angela-zhang-high-school-_n_1207177.html

Some claim this guy found it first.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanzius_effect

Shouldn't either of them been more in the media, how much have people donated to cancer research after all these years.
Advertisement
That is described as something that I remember on TV when I was a kid

Oh wait nvm maybe it was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiofrequency_ablation that I was thinking of
Someone in the news finds a new potential cure for cancer every week. Cancer is not one disease with one cure either.
Yeah, sounds like hype to me. I mean, I don't want to be a killjoy, but it's a bit too perfect a story to be believable. I've grown rather cynical of "look, I'm a teen and I discovered a solution to [insert difficult problem here]" claims, especially when they get mass media attention (a popular story doesn't have to be true as long as it sells).

Hurray for the 3 minute and a half long audio+video advertisement that you can't pause nor mute, as well. I swear newspaper websites today are just a bunch of distracting flash videos glued together, with three paragraphs of text somewhere in the middle.

“If I understand the standard right it is legal and safe to do this but the resulting value could be anything.”


Yeah, sounds like hype to me. I mean, I don't want to be a killjoy, but it's a bit too perfect a story to be believable. I've grown rather cynical of "look, I'm a teen and I discovered a solution to [insert difficult problem here]" claims, especially when they get mass media attention (a popular story doesn't have to be true as long as it sells).


There was a pretty good this american life just recently about something just like this (I feel like a huge TAL fanboy with howmuch I bring it up).

It was actually about radiofrequency ablation I think. The long and short of it is it is much easier to almost cure cancer than actually cure it.
I'll celebrate when it actually cures someone's cancer.

It's always great when advancements in medicine and science are made, and I welcome this advancement, but let's be real: finding a "potential cure for cancer" and actually curing someone's cancer are two very different things. Both are good, but there are so many potential cures for cancer I hear about it's kinda like "Here we go again..."

It's awesome. It's great. I hope it turns out to be the panacea for everything. But for now it's just "potential." That's cool, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

I do think it's pretty impressive she was reading (and eventually understanding) PhD level stuff as a freshman high school student.
[size=2][ I was ninja'd 71 times before I stopped counting a long time ago ] [ f.k.a. MikeTacular ] [ My Blog ] [ SWFer: Gaplessly looped MP3s in your Flash games ]
Is thins the kind of "potential" solution that involves unabtainium or the like?
Nanoparticles as carrier for cancer drugs have been in research for years both in vitro and in vivo. Nothing new, sorry kid.

My mother had cucurmin nanoparticles applied in addition to her 5-FU/cisplatin chemo. She's now 1 1/2 years beyond "her time", without ill effects or signs or tumor progression, which admittedly is great.
However, what does it really mean? It means nothing. Especially for the people for whom it didn't work quite so well. You can call it "miracle", or "luck", or "God's will". Hey, I'm not complaining! But from a scientific point of view, it's just meaningless. Do a placebo-controlled double-blind study with 5000 people and a 10 year follow-up, and we're talking.

What's most notable about that ABC article is that, as usual, someone who has no clue of the matter whatsoever (reporter guy) picks up some hype from someone else who has no clue whatsoever (highschool kid) and makes it "the cure for cancer". This embarrassing simplification neglects tiny details such as that there are roughly a hundred entirely different kinds of "cancer" for every major kind of cancer. Some express one or more of a dozen receptors, some don't. Some grow aggressively, some don't. Some respond to <insert what you like>, some don't. Some people just die, and some don't, although they should.

Someone claiming to have found "the cure for cancer" is like someone claiming to have found the perpetuum mobile. Or the recipe for eternal life, peace on earth, and the end of environmental pollution (all at the same time).
Or the recipe for eternal life, peace on earth, and the end of environmental pollution (all at the same time).

Cryogenically freeze every human on the planet.
Cancer is a multifactorial disease and the proteins or markers expressed by cells are different according to its origin, and the degree of differentiation of tumoral cells... I think there is no a specific solution for all kind of cancer, instead, there will be solutions for the particularities of the disease, such as monoclonal antibodies (that bind a specific protein)... It's hard to manage pharmacological selectivity for a problem that has no selective targets common to all the cases...

(I know my english is weird...)

This topic is closed to new replies.

Advertisement