[shubi]

I think most of us know somebody or a family suffer from cancer. I see there are something missing from the scenerio, that is data gathering. If you talk to a cancer treatment personal they will tell you if you have a member of your family with cancer rest of the family members chance is very high to have cancer at later date. my first approach is based on all the members in the family share FOOD, so lets catalog every piece of food they consume from all the members as far as we can go, catalog them on a portable computer, enter the data as you interview, go to the next effected house and so on. The computer will print out match and mismatch items
2nd approch, cancer specialist always takes sample from a patitent, work backward to determine the chemical responsible and idetify the cure.

[helene_t]

There's lots of data registration on cancer patients. Especially in Scandinavia, where all cancer patients go into a central registry for each country. Enormous numbers of rodents have been genetically manipulated to aquire cancer and/or exposed to all kinds of putitive carcinogens. And thousands of researchers try to find paterns in the data.

As for a link between food and cancer (or between food and you-name-it-condition) it's difficult to show paterns because of a number of problems:
- Popular model animals (rodents) have very different diets compared to humans, which makes results from animal experiements largely irelavant.
- You cannot ask volunteers in cohort studies to live on a controled diet.
- You can barely ask people what they eat. They won't know.
- Diet is confounded by lots of factors. Case in point: Japanese women get less breast cancer than American women, and Japanese immigrants in the U.S. converge towards American frequencies in that respect. Is it because they drink more coffie the more integrated they get? Or eat less fish? Or drink more milk? Or become more likely to take up payed work? Or more likely to have sex with men of European decent who tend to carry some unknown "European" carcinogenic virus?

[sceptic]

Dont find a cure for cancer or for AIDs, if you cure both of these, then the world really is going to become a more populated place, eventually what ever suffering and inequality in the world now, will be exagretated in 50 or more years when we cure everything and everyone dies at 80/90+

What a wonderful legacy we ae going to leave for our kids and grandkids, mans stupity never ceases to amaze me

[mike777]

ok if we cannot find a cure..can we find a long term livable alternative?

[Gerben42]

Cancer "just happens". One little copy mistake and BAM! I think the best one COULD do is to reduce the chance of getting it is avoiding the extremely obvious things like smoking. The focus should be on curing and early detection.

[Al_U_Card]

Like many instances of too much of a good thing, most cancer related functions are part of the survival and reproduction of the species. Living beyond the "norm" results in some of these "aspects" of bodily functions going awry. Life is life and so is existance. No kids have mumps and measles nowadays, they have otitis and asthma. There will always be ways for the body to express its inner workings no matter what modern science comes up with so we better get used to it.

[shubi]

oh well let just tell my opinion STATUS QUO is not my way of justifying any thing.
sure cigrattes and lung cancer are connected together. now most kid starts at their teen age smoking. they smoke till 60 65 years and may or maynot get cancer. S0 if it take someone to smoke for 60 years it could not be very dangerous. piece.