Cancer Advances

Posted on June 14, 2008
Filed Under Science | 2 Comments

P. Z. Meyers has a fantastic post on advances in cancer treatment.

Let me steal his main graph since you just have to see it.

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There’s also been a slew of discoveries the past couple of years that’ll probably start reaching the market in about 6 – 10 years that are amazingly exciting. (Especially for colon cancer) Presumably not all will pan out but even if only a quarter of them do there’s going to be some big improvements in society.

I’d also second his cry for more research. I’ll concede that Bush and the former Republican leadership deserve a lot of blame for cutting scientific research and diverting too much research into more practical applications for the War on Terror. (Some of that is understandable and good – some just very shortsighted) The fact is, however, that Democrats have controlled the legislative branches for two years now and science funding still sucks. 2008 isn’t passed yet but could be bad. (I recognize the Senate passed 75-22 a bill that restores some funding to basic research including Fermilab – but it’s unclear what will actually be sent to the President given the House.) Strangely though we aren’t yet hearing about a Democratic war on science. To be fair they have only a slight majority and Bush has threatened vetoes on appropriation bills. However the point is that this is unfortunately a problem of government and not necessarily a particular party. Everyone should be focused on making this an issue so that all politicians pay attention.

McCain doesn’t, so far as I know, say much about specifics on science funding. Hillary I’ll give credit to. She had a lot of specific proposals that were great. Obama, so far as I can tell, has a few vague generalities not significantly better than McCain. He criticizes Bush on science but that’s like shooting sitting ducks. Interestingly he abstained from voting on the current funding bill for science.

In any case the real power for funding these issues is the legislative branches. Republicans sadly deserve the blame for what they did through 2000-2006. Democrats deserve the blame now. They love to trash the Republicans but sadly I don’t see them doing much of a better job.

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  4. Cancer & Stem Cells
  5. Anti-Science in the Left
  6. Thoughts on the Election

Comments

2 Responses to “Cancer Advances”

Nice graphic. You could create the same kind of graphic for diabetes, heart disease, and probably a whole host of other diseases. But cancer is definitely the biggest attention-getter (for this sort of thing).

My guess is that Democrats in Congress are just biding their time until a democratic president takes office–why put a ton of effort into battling Bush’s veto now? While I would like Obama to be more specific (and to adopt Clinton’s proposal to double the NIH budget), I still find his “vague generalities” far more comforting than McCain’s total silence.

On a side note, Fermilab has nothing to do with NIH funding. Of course, you know that, but many Americans hear “science” and think that NIH, NSF, Dept of Energy, etc. are all the same thing. It is my impression (based on talking to friends who are physicists) that funding for physics has not suffered nearly as much (or at all) under Bush when compared to biomedical science funding; physics drives military advancements, after all.

Yes, I should have been clearer on that however physics funding has been having a very rocky road the past few years. Of course it all depends upon how you view funding cuts. Some of the large accelerators aren’t exactly the best bang for the buck in my view. (I know particle physicists will be shocked) Also having worked on fusion research in the past when they had huge budgets I hate to say it but a lot of that is a waste IMO. So the dollars don’t tell the whole story.

This year’s physics funding is pretty bad but a lot of that can be laid on the Democratic front as they put in less than Bush requested.

It’s a tricky issue though since breaking out fundamental research from more applied (typically military or homeland security) funding is difficult. But it was difficult way back when I worked at LANL. Then there were lots of folks funded by the military who were doing a lot of basic physics research because of that money. (Not necessarily directly – but they were doing other research than the military stuff but the military stuff was paying their salary)

With regards to McCain and Obama, I tend to agree. I’m not a big fan of McCain in general for a variety of reasons. While I’m skeptical of Obama I suspect things might be easier under him. About the best I can say of McCain is that he’s a believer in global warming and thus solving the issue, he’s more pro-environmental than Bush, but also fiscally responsible (as I’m skeptical of Obama on).

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