Don’t make promises you can’t keep
Hmm.
.@JoeBiden in Ottumwa, Iowa: "I promise you if I'm elected president, you're going to see the single most important thing that changes America — we're going to cure cancer."
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) June 11, 2019
He can’t “promise” that. It’s an absurd thing to say. He could promise to increase funding to cancer research, but he can’t promise that if he’s elected we’ll “cure” cancer. Cancer isn’t One Thing, so “it” can’t be cured, boom, game over. Survival rates can be improved but I don’t think anyone who knows anything about it talks about curing cancer full stop.
The doofus act was ok for a sidekick. It’s not ok for this. Promising to cure cancer is worthy of Trump, not a serious alternative to Trump.
Go home, Joe Biden.
Honestly.
As bad as cancer is, is curing it “the single most important thing that changes America?”
I’m guessing “No.”
Right now, I’d go with some sort of electoral reform that eliminates the Electoral College and prevents gerrymandering. Add to that mechanisms that better enforce the “checks and balances” that aren’t checking or balancing much of anything.
” I’d go with some sort of electoral reform that eliminates the Electoral College ”
You’ll have a better chance of curing cancer.
I agree with your comments on the politics behind such promises.
There is something common among all cancers, the genetic mechanisms and mutations that lead to abnormal growth of some cells. It is these common features that justify all of them being called with one name, ‘cancer’.
Why can we rule out the discovery of some fundamental truths behind the underlying genetic mechanisms and therefore potential cure based on them?
#4 – regardless of the ‘fundamental truths’, scientists have been working on this problem for a very long time. Joe Biden will make no difference to it one way or another. The ‘fundamental truths’ have not led us much closer to a solution, and are not likely to during the term of a Joe Biden, or anybody else.
I actually find this to be an insulting statement on his part. Scientists are the ones working on this, and the implication is that they haven’t been working hard enough, and that he will get them working on it. Yes, I realize he is almost certainly referring to funding, but Biden is probably one of the few people in the country that has been part of the government for long enough, and in enough roles, to recognize how the funding system works.
Cancer research is one of the better funded fields, but we still haven’t “cured cancer” and I don’t see that happening in my lifetime, let alone in the term of the next president whoever he (I would say or she, but I find that hard to imagine at this time) is.
And why always cancer? Cardiovascular diseases kill more people than cancer, but all anybody seems to want to cure is cancer.
Because, with the main exception of lung cancer, it’s the one of the big killers that we can’t blame the victim for. (And there’s a reason why breast cancer and prostate cancer and leukemia, etc. get better fundraising than lung cancer) Cardiovascular disease is correlated with obesity, poor diet, and lack of exercise, isn’t it? Diabetes? Ditto. Suicide? By definition, self-inflicted. Pneumonia and influenza? Well, they mostly kill people who were already old or sick, right?
I’m not endorsing that attitude, mind you, just observing it.
Because cancer is fine as a general term for ‘clump of cells dividing without restraint’ – but there are a dizzying variety of ways that this can be achieved. So far, we have not found any commonality in cancers that is A) applicable to all of them and B) is also exploitable in some fashion that can lead to a cure. That’s not to say that we can rule it out, but we also can’t just assume that such a cure is there to be found.
To put it another way, we get to talk about finding a general cancer cure when we have indications that such exists.
Screechy, that is so depressingly true (except lung cancer – because smoking). I used to work for Social Security Disability, and the examiners were outraged that we considered cirrhosis disabling. Diabetes, too. They didn’t look at heart disease that way, though. Asthma they considered not serious enough to even take time to do more than mock someone who filed for disability based on asthma – and they were quite amused at the claimant I had to deny as having a “non-serious” condition in their asthma because they couldn’t afford a doctor, and they died before they could get to the appointment I scheduled for them! So few people there with true compassion…and don’t get me started on what they said about mental illnesses!
Still, they were only the people who evaluated the cases, based on standards they didn’t set, so they had to allow those cirrhosis cases, those diabetes cases, etc. And the disability due to alcoholism? Yeah, they were stuck with allowing those, too, if they met the standards. Lot of moaning over that.
I agree that lung cancer is mostly self-inflicted but there have been plenty of cases where the sufferer didn’t smoke. Yes, most of them were people who worked in smoky atmospheres – pubs, clubs, and the like – but can that really be classed as self-inflicted? Sometimes, as we all know, one has to take what’s on offer, or starve.
AoS, I agree, but I was reporting other people’s ideas. And I had an uncle die of non-alcoholic cirrhosis, though he never took a drink in his life. Meanwhile, his brother, a heavy drinker for years, is alive at 87.
And I suffered a lot from my asthma because I worked in smoky offices before the government offices went non-smoking. I grew up in a house with a smoker. I will never breathe normally without medication, and it can hardly be called self-inflicted, though much of it was smoking related. I have never been a smoker.