This talk was by a cancer doctor named David Agus. He argued that cancer explores should not focus on finding a cure for cancer, but looking for the origin of where cancer started. He came up with this idea because over three decades already, the death percentage of cancer has not change, while other serious diseases' death rate had drop dramatically.
He believe that it is time to change the way people think about how they would use money to do cancer project. They should change the old way of thinking how to cure cancer, instead, they should learn about how did cancer form, and how to prevent cancer to form. He tried to show why this thought should change by brought forth different datas showing how cancer treatment had not helped the rate of death from cancer to decrease, but remain the same rate.
He descirbe cancer as a system of systems. In a system, there is a input and output with a state in the middle. In this case, our input is our enviornmnet, diet, treatment, and a little bit of genetic mutation, and the output is the symptom that we get out of. He thinks at if we would control the input we have, we can control the output, in other words, we can change the outcome we get by limiting what we put into our body. This is probably the most efficient way to limit our chance to get cancer. Also, he pointed out that cancer is not about genetic, it is more of how a person does later in their lives that affect the outcome of cancer. He even brought the idea saying no doctor had shown that how chemotherapy directly reduce cancer growth in the body, and how it had helped cured cancer. He even did a test that showed people who took chemotherapy, although killed a little protion of tumor, they had a higher rate of death from cancer than other that did not took the chemotherapy.
The speaker leave us with a quote by Andy, CEO of Intel saying, " No technology will win, technology itself wins." This quote made me think a little while, then I finally got what he meant when he brought out this quote. I personally think he was trying to say that, although techonology has been improved more and more advance, we still cannot rely on technology, because there is always more to explore, and new things to discover in the technology world. Same as it is in cancer projects, we cannot rely on new technology we discovered to cure cancer, because there are still deep things underneath it that we have not found. I personally think that what he said might to controversial and different from what others believe in, but I think he was right. If we take this idea into a more common case, let's say, lose fat. If we do not eliminate our input, such as oilly food, can we expect that we can lose fat as an output? I believe it is time to change a direction in cancer projects. We should change our thought into thinking the origin of cancer rather than finding a cure for cancer, because input can be limited but output cannot. I believe there is a better chance to decrease the death rate of cancer by to prevent rather than cure.
If I were to explore in a frontier, I would probably go with what Daivd Agus had brought froth by his powerful speech. What he had brought froth is a very new strategy and very truth in a sense. I would say I have to do a lots of study on cancer patient, on what input that they had that might affect the outcome, and how did the cancer actually form. There would be a lot of studies following by the topic, but it is defenitly worth it, because if this study really succeed, it must have brought many fortune to this world for it had prevent people from this deadly disease.
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