Most cancer can be prevented and if caught early treated with surgery, chemo, or radiation. No need to look for a cure, those people will probably just keep smoking or eating or exposing themselves to the environment and die anyway.

▲

ch4s3 4 days ago | parent [-]

> Most cancer can be prevented

This is a highly questionable statement. There are myriad reasons for the kinds of DNA copying errors that cause cancer(s), and few are mono-causal. Type-II diabetes is mainly a lifestyle disease and barely existed 50 years ago. That said any treatment or effort to cure Type-II diabetes is laudable, and it's clear that broad societal factors create the conditions for so many people to develop diabetes.

▲

bregma 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Your misplaced confidence that Type II diabetes is a lifestyle disease for which you can just judge the victim is questionable.

I have never been overweight, I eat healthy (mostly plants, very little refined carbs), and I am active and run 5k regularly. That didn't prevent me from inheriting T2 from both my parents by the time I turned 60.

I'm pretty certain T2 was widespread 50 years ago. We just didn't test for it and people just lost their feet or went blind or had heart attacks as they got old. Was there even an inexpensive, rapid test for HbA1c in 1975?

	▲	ch4s3 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		If your read carefully, you'll note that I said largely. There is clearly a genetic component and non-lifestyle environmental factors. You don't need to go back to the 1970s even. In 1990 fewer than 5% of Americans had Type II diabetes and now that number probably exceeds 15%.

▲

peterfirefly 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A lot of them are probably not copying errors but errors in which parts of the genome are turned on and which parts are turned off.

(Agree entirely about type 2 diabetes.)

▲

ch4s3 4 days ago | parent [-]

Sure DNA methylation can also just happen for any number of reasons.

	▲	peterfirefly 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I don't methylation is the only mechanism for that.

▲

dpc050505 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Also a lot of environmental factors that can cause cancer are out of your control if you live in an urban area.

	▲	ch4s3 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		The cancer rates are relatively comparable in urban vs rural zip coeds in the US[1]. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38801414/