They also prove that if you remove meat/dairy from your diet, you cannot get cancer.
Words cannot describe the level of FAIL in that sentence...
They also prove that if you remove meat/dairy from your diet, you cannot get cancer.
There is no money in a cure.
Watch the movie Forks Over Knives and you will understand what is the main cause of cancer.
They also prove that if you remove meat/dairy from your diet, you cannot get cancer.
If you already have cancer and you cut meat/dairy out of your diet, it cannot progress and many times it will regress!
What I don't fully understand is why it seems that there is not enough sharing of new information that can help make progress faster.
Is there an 'Open Source' Medical Science movement?
If the private sectors share their findings more openly there could be faster developments.
I could not agree more.It's a bit more complicated than that, I'm afraid.
I dislike to call you out on this... but your notion of a common cold cure exposes your lack of knowledge in the area. Outside of vaccines there will probably never be a practical antiviral drug for the "common cold."
The existent of the Human Genome project along with the not so well know Cancer Genome Atlas project should clue us all into the reality that 'cures' are and can be available.
Snip
There is no money in a cure.
Watch the movie Forks Over Knives and you will understand what is the main cause of cancer.
They also prove that if you remove meat/dairy from your diet, you cannot get cancer.
If you already have cancer and you cut meat/dairy out of your diet, it cannot progress and many times it will regress!
On another note if they did find a cure, how would that lower profit? People would still get colds, and they would buy the cure instead of the remedy. Then they would buy it again when they next get a cold.
Any drug company that finds a 'cure' for cancer will rake in enormous profits whilst it is still patented.
Yup, no meat, no milk - no cancer. Yup...![]()
I understand why you think this, as this kind of thinking was explicitly marketed (and believed) by many scientists and politicians when talking about the human genome project. I don't have time at the moment go into depth, but "cures" aren't just lurking in the sequence data. There is a fundamental misunderstanding here on the nature of genes, genetics, disease, and the somewhat mythical idea of biological determinism. It ain't that simple.
Edit: I say this as someone who works on large scale medical and population sequencing projects.
Words cannot describe the level of FAIL in that sentence...![]()
This is 100% incorrect. Do you honestly think that thousands upon thousands of deaths could be prevented every year if cancer patients simply changed their diets? In fact, many have tried and very few saw any health benefits (fewer still had their lives spared). For goodness' sake, this is exactly what Steve Jobs tried, but his disease continued to progress.There is no money in a cure.
Watch the movie Forks Over Knives and you will understand what is the main cause of cancer.
They also prove that if you remove meat/dairy from your diet, you cannot get cancer.
If you already have cancer and you cut meat/dairy out of your diet, it cannot progress and many times it will regress!
Yup, no meat, no milk - no cancer. Yup...![]()
Cracking the genetic codeof a virus (like the common cold) would provide all sorts of information to thousands of other viruses that attack us. The hows and whys are very important information. So as to lowering profit - your statement says you have no idea how commoditized and competitive the research market has become.
Yeah, I know. It sounds crazy but its true.
I don't misunderstand it at all. Of course they aren't lurking around...but the possibility once the various viruses and bacteria are decoded is enormous.
And if you follow anyone such as Dr.Austin and his approach to Evolutionary Biology...well then I agree it can get a bit of a 'mythical' nature.<G>
But I stil stand by my previous statement that the path to 'cures' is in the Genome projects. When we understand how 'stuff' works (not just cataloging what they are mind you) we can open the door to understanding why they work and what we can do to stop them - if indeed we still think stopping them is the right path.
No problem on the info. Sharing information falls under the parameters of patent law-- in terms of industry, no one wants to share their secrets and discoveries if they can attribute a monetary value to them, which they always can, since information is power. It would be akin to apple sending sony their new phone six months before the product announcement. Any insight gained cost them money as well, so sharing information would be like giving away all of your advantages in a race-- no one wants to do that. If information were freely shared within industry there would be zero incentive to innovate--as it stands the best system is patents, where information is not freely shared but disclosed and covered by law for a set period of time. It's the balance between both sides-- industry doesn't have to share all of the secrets and knowledge that gave them the competitive edge, but at the same time some of that information is publicly presented in the form of a patent. Make no mistake though; industry scientists do publish to journals too, it's just that the content shared within is not deemed vital to their business practices and thus is typically of lesser importance or novelty. For example, if a company like Pfizer were to obtain a crystal structure for a kinase implicated in cancer, they would never share it via patents or publications-- information like that is almost priceless from a commercial standpoint.Thanks for all the details provided.
What I don't fully understand is why it seems that there is not enough sharing of new information that can help make progress faster.
Is there an 'Open Source' Medical Science movement?
If the private sectors share their findings more openly there could be faster developments.
What about organizations like WHO?
Once again, if governments stop spending money in wars and start using those funds for medical research for cures of diseases and full erratication of well known diseases we will be making more progress as humans.
Tell me how that went when you get cancer. In the meantime, I'll be enjoying my meat and dairy. Since you clearly didn't read my previous postings, I'll keep this succinct: there is a huge amount of money in a cure; a movie (that's biased no less) does not provide real scientific details and is not a trusted source; the idea of no dairy/meat curing and preventing cancer is absolutely ludicrous-- words cannot aptly describe how dumb that sentiment is. That said, I have a feeling you don't want to listen to me anyways, and thus ignored everything I wrote thus far.There is no money in a cure.
Watch the movie Forks Over Knives and you will understand what is the main cause of cancer.
They also prove that if you remove meat/dairy from your diet, you cannot get cancer.
If you already have cancer and you cut meat/dairy out of your diet, it cannot progress and many times it will regress!
Generics companies are essentially the jail breaking community-- they seek to reduce the effect that the originator has over their IP in the open market by providing a cheaper alternative. Just like Apple fighting JBing, research driven companies do the same against generics in order to maintain their market advantage and profits. Academia also participates in this deconstruction-- often much work is done with therapeutics released to market by the academic institutions looking for more answers or other uses not pursued or considered by the originator.I hope that a similar passion and willingness of what we see in the hacking community is applied into the medical research.
The jailbreaking and unlocking of iOS devices is an impressive model of collaboration and sharing of new knowledge that obtains results, without initial motivation for profits, those come afterwards as side benefits.
The human body and bioscience are nothing like computers and software created by humans, and there are still plenty of unknowns, despite this I think more could be done.
I'm torn. I know exactly where you're coming from. In most cases it's not expensive to publish-- if you have connections, memberships, or other perks you can easily get into journals of all sizes, and many of the best journal are borderline free. That said, I think all publishing should be free-- you are giving them material to publish-- they don't have to create any content at all, just aggregate and sort it. If anything they should be paying you; knowledge is money, and you're freely giving them knowledge. On the tail end we have access costs, which quite frankly are ****ing absurd. I'm fortunate enough to have access to a large array of journals for free, but sometimes this net doesn't cover everything, and I'm forced to proverbially bite the bullet. $31.50 for 24 hour access to ONE ARTICLE is absolutely NUTS (thanks Elsiver!).There is a huge problem IMHO with the academic publishing environment (read: very expensive to publish, very expensive to access), and I have philosophical issues with medical research that is conducted by or funded by large pharmaceutical corporations.
But, I will point out that there are open access requirements when grants are funded by the NIH (http://publicaccess.nih.gov/), and there do exist excellent (open access) journals for publishing results (http://www.plos.org/).
Not a problemI could not agree more.
Upon seeing the title of the thread, I simply felt like posting a brief comment![]()
Good to see a fellow scientist.SNIP
I think I'll just respond paragraph by paragraph in order to make this more organized and manageable. To start off, I have little respect for those at the NIH. Call it a bias, but in my experience I have found that those who are planted in government positions of science often are those who cannot find a job elsewhere; accordingly they perform "research" driven by personal agendas and politics, not good scientific practice. Of course this is stereotyping, as I'm aware of some decent scientists there, but in general they don't seem to have a good track record. The fact that the NIH claims to "know" something that the industry does not is quite laughable really.There are several research groups out of NIH that know exactly how the path to stopping (or curing as it were) 'common cold'. A few things stop the process from being offered in the US.
Profit...which blocks a lot of research progress; patent greed - where different corporate elements (like Monsanto and Bayer) hold key protein and genetic products and won't let them be released without ridiculous profiteering; and last but certainly not the least is the Fear riddled boobs who understand little about how Genetics work - but will claim that scientists through political pressure will
cause mutant clones of us to be built to control the world....or some such nonsense - and these people like the tea baggers seems to have money on their side - so their politics rule the day. Not that I disagree that companies like
Monsanto cannot be trusted with anything of that potential....but that it blocks the good for the fear of evil.
The existent of the Human Genome project along with the not so well know Cancer Genome Atlas project should clue us all into the reality that 'cures' are and can be available.
Now granted the term 'cure' is a misnomer - but it's a term that a layman will understand - so I use it. A Virus like the Cold is 'cured' through blockers at the genetic level. IOWs we shut the open door in our cells that allow a Virus to enter. At this point it is more like a locksmith who has to see the door before he can make a key...but it can and is done currently. Breast Cancer is a bit more complicated since the discovery that this kind of cancer isn't a single bad guy mutating cells but 7 or 8 different diseases attacking the lungs and cellular structure on multiple levels. It's very complicated to deal with - but can be dealt with none the less.
As for calling me out...really? To me this is just open discussion...if anyone applies critical thinking to the subject matter all the better!<G>
Not a problem. I enjoy educating people and engaging in (civilized) debate from time to time... when I'm not too lazy.Once again, thanks so much for taking the time to post such well informed and informative information. I'm afraid you are, unfortunately, preaching to the choir. Those who are convinced that there is a conspiracy to keep people sick won't bother to read post such as yours. Facts only get in the way of paranoid beliefs.
Also, you are dealing with unbelievably ridiculous tripe (sorry for the animal product pun), as below...
Hey Darkplanets could you comment on the discovery of nanotechnology that has been used to create tiny particles that attack cancer cells while leaving healthy ones alone. I read about it here
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6646581.stm
Do think that there is any promise in this type of cancer therapy in the near future?
With over 120 different classifications for Cancer, they will be designing for some time yet.![]()
Hey Darkplanets could you comment on the discovery of nanotechnology that has been used to create tiny particles that attack cancer cells while leaving healthy ones alone. I read about it here
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6646581.stm
Do think that there is any promise in this type of cancer therapy in the near future?
the limitations lie in the commercial viability of such research-- they can't sell or pursue their results without licensing.
Moving on, you mention the big evil company that every Ag person loves or hates, Monsanto. I think it's safe to say that they don't hold key protein and genetic products it's seeds, not therapeutics.
Again though they're patents, they expire. As long as they don't hold copyrights there won't be an issue for scientific advancement. That said, it's time for a qualifier: I don't think all genetic constructs should be patenable, which is a tricky task in itself. Should synthetic constructs be patented? Yes. Should naturally occurring constructs be? No. Just my opinion though-- again with patents they have a maximum lifetime.
Just so you know, I'm all for genetic engineering. I love pDNA, miRNA, siRNA they're all good tools to solve different problems, with the key being selection of the proper tool for the job. If you read my previous posts you'd see that gene delivery is indeed approaching human therapeutic status Mark David and his company out at Caltech is in Phase III with his CD-polymer. If he succeeds he'll be the first company to sell siRNA constructs for use in man.
To be fair, I too have worked in gene and drug delivery, and that has highlighted it's limitations for me. Gene delivery (or genetic material delivery) is NOT the silver bullet everyone thinks it is.
The issue is that cancer is so complicated and has so many forms the cancer genome atlas will only show the correlations between GENETIC causes, and not even all of them...... If you just pull the tumor graft and sequence it you would never know that; you would only know the sequencing of the tumor. There's other complications too, regulation being key. Just because it's in your genome doesn't mean it's actively being translated or is the cause of the cancer; the state of the epigenome (if you believe in it) and other signaling factors also influence expression and thus the genotype of the cell.
It would work initially, but viruses are just like your immune system, they constantly adapt to survive. In a short segment of time your virus of interest could again mutate, this time to dock to the mutated receptor, or if the receptor was knocked out, a different receptor could be adapted. It suffers the same issues as retrovirals given time (sometimes a short amount), the virus can adapt, thus negating that treatment choice.
In this regard therapeutics are really nothing more than a game of cat and mouse we see this even in antibacterial agents that many thought would always work. Look at all the resistant strains in circulation today. Penicillin used to be the catch all; it isn't anymore by a long shot. Even bacteria adapt, though at a much slower rate than viruses.
There is no money in a cure.
Watch the movie Forks Over Knives and you will understand what is the main cause of cancer.
They also prove that if you remove meat/dairy from your diet, you cannot get cancer.
If you already have cancer and you cut meat/dairy out of your diet, it cannot progress and many times it will regress!
Yeah, I know. It sounds crazy but its true.
Think about it this way. There is not a drug in the world that can cure diabetes. However, if you eat well and exercise, it will disappear.
The drug companies do not want the public knowing this.