Reply to Re: A cure for cancer found
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Meta's right. There's no great conspiracy but stuff like this is an unfortunate consequence of how society functions right now. It takes a LOT of money to develop drugs. Private institutions (e.g. pharma companies) are only interested in things they can make money from. If the drug can't be patented, you can't make much money from it, so the pharma companies won't be interested. This is true for all forms of research... the private institutions only do research to benefit their own company and products. Although everyone recognises the importance of general research for the purpose of the progress of science or the betterment of society, it's generally expected that governments will fund these endeavours through grants to universities. Unfortunately the amount of money through government funded research is often relatively small compared to the money available to private institutions. So you get unfortunate consequences such as much more money being available for certain things and not for others depending on how much profit can be made.
So two things can be done about this:
a) tone down the culture of selfish, profit-seeking capitalism, and expect companies to be more socially responsible (e.g. IBM used to do general research)
b) increase government funding for research
I don't think what I wrote above it particularly controversial.. it appears to be generally accepted among researchers to be true. eg from the university release about it:
"However, as DCA is not patented, Michelakis is concerned that it may be difficult to find funding from private investors to test DCA in clinical trials. He is grateful for the support he has already received from publicly funded agencies, such as the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR), and he is hopeful such support will continue and allow him to conduct clinical trials of DCA on cancer patients."
Note that I'm just replying based on the release from the university. The blog post is nonsense. The researchers have no conflict of interest whatsoever to motivate them to 'keep secret' a cure for cancer. Yet they don't say it is a cure or even a treatment. They say they need to do more research:
"When will DCA become a treatment option for cancer patients?
When more clinical trials in more than a few centres show DCA does not hurt patients and helps them more than a placebo.
Until then, its use from unregulated and "for-profit" and without medical supervision is both inappropriate and dangerous, because at the wrong doses and in the wrong patient DCA can be toxic."
So two things can be done about this:
a) tone down the culture of selfish, profit-seeking capitalism, and expect companies to be more socially responsible (e.g. IBM used to do general research)
b) increase government funding for research
I don't think what I wrote above it particularly controversial.. it appears to be generally accepted among researchers to be true. eg from the university release about it:
"However, as DCA is not patented, Michelakis is concerned that it may be difficult to find funding from private investors to test DCA in clinical trials. He is grateful for the support he has already received from publicly funded agencies, such as the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR), and he is hopeful such support will continue and allow him to conduct clinical trials of DCA on cancer patients."
Note that I'm just replying based on the release from the university. The blog post is nonsense. The researchers have no conflict of interest whatsoever to motivate them to 'keep secret' a cure for cancer. Yet they don't say it is a cure or even a treatment. They say they need to do more research:
"When will DCA become a treatment option for cancer patients?
When more clinical trials in more than a few centres show DCA does not hurt patients and helps them more than a placebo.
Until then, its use from unregulated and "for-profit" and without medical supervision is both inappropriate and dangerous, because at the wrong doses and in the wrong patient DCA can be toxic."
