Pointless basically sums this and other Obama science initiatives pretty accurately.
I was talking with my adviser a few weeks ago about this. His criticism is that the "Moonshot" aspect of the project is "Get everyone together and figure out how to cure cancer". Which is to say: there isn't a yet plan. I still stand by the value of the BRAIN initiative though. There at least the plan is: invest in concrete goals to drive the technology behind brain imaging forward.
I disagree. The author is basically arguing "it's stupid to fight cancer because people will still die." But without Nixon's moonshot my aunt would be dead at 24 with two motherless children instead of a grandmother three times over. Yes, cancer is a million diseases miscategorized as one but we spent $700B on TARP and something like $2T on Iraq. With 80% of medical expenses accumulating in the last six months of life, let's fuckin' spend some money on something other than palliative care. 'cuz that shit ain't going away either.
I don't think he's arguing that we shouldn't put money into cancer research. He cites the gains in treatment and survivability for a number of cancers starting with Nixon as positive examples of what we can accomplish. I think he's arguing that it's stupid to search for a "cure" because there's no such thing as a "cure for cancer". I think he is (and certainly I am) annoyed by the way no one really wants to fund science (especially re: the money you cite for ridiculous programs for which there is always a lot of cash on hand), but they still want the political points that you can score by putting an "initiative" together.
I've heard this argument before, but does that really mean it doesn't make sense to talk about cancer as a class of disease? I know next to nothing about medicine, but in many other areas a technology that can solve one member of a class of problem can be adapted to solve other members of that class. Treating "cancer" as a class of problem needing solving still seems like a reasonable thing to do at the level of funding even if different cancers are different enough that at the level of research you have to focus on particular cancers.cancer is a million diseases miscategorized as one
A simple analogy would be to compare "cancer" to "poisoning". Food can go bad and poison you. You can eat poison. You can inadvertently be poisoned. You can engage in activities that increase the likelihood of you being poisoned. But to find a "cure" for poisoning is basically pointless because it is too broad. You can reduce your exposure to poison, you can have unfortunate allergies that cause you to react to thing like peanuts as if they are poison, or, one day, you can just eat the wrong thing and get poisoned. And some things aren't poison unless you get too much of them. There is no one "cure" for those different vectors. Cancer is similar, broadly speaking. It is a wide variety of diseases triggered by a variety of factors, and finding one magic bullet that cures them all is a total fantasy. My understanding is that the current front edge of research is to define cancers of different organs as different diseases. So liver cancer is not brain cancer is not lung cancer. Narrowing the problem space down also helps reduce the number of variables that have to be accounted for if something wants to call itself a "cure".