• conditional_soup
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    4 months ago

    IIRC, curing cancer was (one of?) Obama’s moonshot goal.

    And to be fair, landing on the moon is about seven orders of magnitude easier than “curing cancer”, at least imo. Cancer is a constellation of different mutations in different tissues such that even something like “lung cancer” is really an umbrella term for a multitude of disease causes, the same way that the “common cold” is an umbrella term for all kinds of different viral infections. That means that the things you need to do to silver bullet each different cancer are likely different, which means Obama was pushing for several hundred penicillin-like eureka level discoveries in his administration. That’s completely zonko-bananas.

    Tackling climate change, by comparison, is a much easier, much more realistic and attainable goal. We know the cause of climate change (too much GHG), we know how to fix it (less GHG), AND we know what to do to get there (reduce and remove GHG emissions).

    • RGB3x3@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      I’m no expert or anything, but curing cancer is getting pretty close, from what I’ve heard. The mRNA vaccine research is having great impacts on being able to fight cancerous cells.

      We may be closer than we realize to living in a cancer-free world.

      • conditional_soup
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        4 months ago

        That’s great news! I’ve heard a few snippets about the mRNA vaccine, but it all sounded like early research, not something to lend a lot of credibility to yet. Has there been some recent updates on that?