somebody wrote:
> "Mueen Nawaz" <m.n### [at] ieeeorg> wrote in message
> news:48dc20be$1@news.povray.org...
>> somebody wrote:
> 
>>> Fine. But if you are intellectually honest, you will also be able to say
> "I
>>> have no reason to believe that finding the top quark will have *any*
>>> practical applications, and thus won't take it as an assumption" (people
> in
> 
>> I *am* being intellectually honest. I've already said earlier that I
>> have no reason to believe throwing $100 billion at cancer research will
>> bring us an iota closer to curing it.
> 
> That's an interesting position. How do you think then, if ever, will cancer
> be cured?
> 
> Conversely, do you believe that the past advances in the field of cancer
> treatment occured randomly, not as a result of directed research with
> funding?
> 
> If you believe that past advances in cancer treatment were a result of
> funded research, you *DO* have *some* evidence that "funded and directed
> research" works and all is not random or comes out of thin air.
> 
> Or, of course, you might believe that while we spent so much already on
> cancer research, we have made zero advances.
> 
> So what is it? Do we take past methodologies that yielded success as a
> reasonable way to proceed in the future? Or do we try random, but zero cost
> things since "you don't have a reason to believe money helps with cancer
> research"?
> 
Hmm. Where to start.. First thing, we started out thinking that cancer 
was "one" single things, with "one" single trigger. Whoops! Its not. We 
now know some are caused by infections, and we can, in at least one 
case, vaccinate against "most" forms of it (obviously, a few forms of it 
are triggered by genetic damage or other things). We know of *several* 
mechanisms that can cause it, and have ideas about what can be done to 
fix it, except that, since its caused by genetic anomalies, its proving 
hard to come up with a delivery mechanism that will either "fix" or 
"kill" only those cells effected, while preventing the body from 
destroying the delivery mechanism. However, despite all these problems, 
most cancers are, in the last 20 years, 90-100% survivable, with no 
outward sign you had them, while 20+ years ago, they where probably more 
like 1-50% survivable, and left the person permanently scared from them, 
in many cases.

The real problem? How is the money actually spent. Something like 20%, 
at least, of your $100 billion figure is spent on "awareness" campaigns, 
which attempt to bring in more money, but waste huge amounts on stuff 
that has jack to actually do with finding cures or treatments. Second 
issue is, define cure? Sometimes cure doesn't mean "prevent it 
happening", or, "fix it without surgery". Often, even in other "well 
understood" fields, "cure" is still, "remove the source of the problem, 
then treat them for anything left over, until your sure its all gone." 
Only by applying a very narrow definition of cure do you get to claim 
that no progress has been made.

Hmm. Reminds me of something a doctor said on a blog recently. He had a 
patient that came in with a badly infected arm, some of the tissue 
turning blue. He gave the guy a load of antibiotics to take, having 
determined that it was an infection, and told him to come back in at a 
later date. The guy did, and the pills had worked, leaving almost no 
sign of the bite marks that had gotten infected. Being a liberal, and 
dealing with a friend and patient that **loved** to babble on about how 
much "better" everything was way back when, the doctor, having gotten 
fed up at this point with it, stated, "You know, when I first started my 
practice in 1954, I would have had to remove the entire arm, due to the 
infection you had, and even then, there was a good chance you would have 
died from the infection anyway. The next time you ramble on about how 
much better the 'good old days' where, you might want to remember that."

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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