Besides cancer isn't really "a disease" but rather "a family of diseases" that can vary a lot. Even breast cancer can be one of many different cancers.

It's like saying "we'll cure infectious diseases"

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traceroute66 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> It's like saying "we'll cure infectious diseases"

Don't worry, I'm sure that's his next blog post. Right after Claude has finished solving famine and poverty. ;)

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fnord123 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We will cure virus.

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kanzure 7 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> We will cure virus.

It is possible to prevent most viruses by recoding the human genome (requires embryo engineering or pre-embryo engineering) to use alternate codons that existing natty viruses don't use. This wouldn't prevent synthetic viruses from being developed that use the alternate codons, of course.

As for "curing cancer", I suspect that Anthropic or OpenAI will use their high status/reputation to launder the existing solutions (germline, p53, enhanced DNA damage repair pathways, etc) that society has refused to accept. They might have enough reputation to get people to look at these ideas. It won't cure people with stage 5 turbo-cancer a.k.a the walking dead, but hopefully we won't be moving the goal posts _that_ much on them.

	▲	jacquesm 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		What could possibly go wrong...

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FeteCommuniste an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

We will cure carpet. We will cure desk. We will cure lamp.

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alphazard 44 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

"Cancer isn't a single disease" is often shouted from the Dunning-Kruger peak of cancer research. I think it was popularized by an explainer video on Youtube, and now it's being memed. The people who think this way want to legitimize funding a particular research niche that they benefit from.

A more sophisticated view is that cancer (one idea) is an problem of rates (like most things in biology) and there is a tumor burden per unit time from whatever causes vs. the immune system's capacity to detect and destroy them per unit time. As humans age, the balance tips in one direction. If the balance is too far off for too long, tumors accumulate, doctors take notice, and assign whatever labels to the condition.

Looking into particular causes of tumors (and calling each cause its own cancer) can create a vast research program that employs a lot of people, since there are so many mutations that lead to tumors. But interrupting the development of a particular mutation is not going to have the same society-changing effect that solving the fundamental issue of rates would.

	▲	root-parent 21 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		>> "Cancer isn't a single disease" is often shouted from the Dunning-Kruger peak of cancer research. Literally first phrase on Cancer Wikipedia entry.... [1] "Cancer is a group of diseases involving uncontrolled cell growth typically resulting in tumors with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body...." [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer
	▲	inciampati 30 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		And this business of rates is also why getting the immune system—such as via personalized vaccine—to recognize a tumor is functionally "curing cancer". The problem is it isn't one disease in the sense that different tissues, cell types, and systems are affected leading to different parameters in the design and delivery of said vaccines.