i bloody hope so

Efour said:
Eradicating natures inbuilt self destruct is as much as a blessing as a curse.
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Yes. Context is crucial. Cancer does the same thing.

I think it's remarkable that medical knowledge and technology is advanced enough to create a drug that blocks one specific receptor in one specific type of cell only. That level of targetting on such a small scale in such a complex system is amazing.

I also hope we don't get the usual "Cure for cancer!!!!" nonsense in any of the media. The chance of one cure for the hundreds of significantly different diseases under the umbrella term "cancer" is miniscule and maybe impossible. It's a possible cure for a tiny minority of cancers. But that's still a big deal. The sample size is too small for solid conclusions, but absolute success (from stage 2 or 3 cancer to nothing detectable by any existing scanning technology) in 12 out of 12 patients is significant. The side effects were an issue, up to and including a whole slew of serious medical problems (sepsis, severe kidney damage, etc, etc), but that's a hell of a lot better than dying of cancer. No-brainer choice there.

Minusorange said:
Isn't it fixing broken code in DNA ?

We'll still die of something, just something that isn't as nasty
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Maybe not. It's theoretically possible to stop or reverse biological aging, so a person would remain biologically a young adult indefinitely and they would never get any age-related diseases and would have a much lower risk of most diseases. There is a beginning of a push (from legitimate medical researchers, not "buy these magic beans" scammers) to have aging reclassified as a disease. A potentially curable disease. Which would also dramatically reduce the number of people getting cancer, but that's only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what diseases would be reduced or even eradicated by curing aging. Although I suppose it would still be true that everyone would die of something. If a person lives for long enough, something will kill them eventually. Murder, suicide, accidental death, a disease not related to aging.
 
That's amazing and reported in a reputable journal too. Small trial but it will expand rapidly, no doubt.
 
Pawnless Endgame said:
Yeah, Folding and Seti @ Home were precursors to crypto mining as well. I was just using UD as that was a cancer research project and would be great to repeat this with more research using today's CPUs and GPUs.
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'Precursors' isn't really the right term. That's like saying Usenet was the precursor to Zoom because they both use the CPU to crunch communications data. Anyway, don't forget BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing). It works similar to Folding@Home but has more projects to choose from. Protein folding research (a la FaH and BOINC projects like Rosetta) encompasses cancers as well as HIV, Malaria, COVID etc.
 
Just remember there are over 100 different cancers and so far I think we have cures (or near cures) for around 5 of them.
Imagine if all the experts got together like they did for Covid what they could achieve.
 
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