10 years ago at the blog – – it is now officially too late to be early.

Nothing like going back and reading the original transcript. (Plus original comments)

The wonderful thing about long-range predictions is that, by the time you can actually check them for accuracy, everyone has lost interest and is busy listening to your new round of long-range predictions. In this case we can't say that the claim was wrong (the Ted Talker gave himself a generous upper bound), but we can say that a general cure for cancer will not come faster than he predicted. That's an important point because many people consider it axiomatic that technological progress almost always happens faster than the experts predicted.

It's an idea so deeply held that people, particularly journalists (who, let's be frank, have an ulterior motive for going along with the story) often treat these conceptual IOUs as actual money in the bank, despite a long history of unpaid debts.

To be clear, we have and continue make enormous progress in the fight against cancer it is one of those fields where pretty much every year sees substantial advances, but it is also perhaps the canonical example of a problem that has shown again and again the dangers of hubris.

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Assuming I didn't lose you at "TED Talk"

I need to do more research before I wade into this (or convince Joseph to do it for me), but even with the 10 to 50 year wiggle room, talk of having absolutely total confidence makes me nervous.

[GUY] RAZ: Which they did, an amazing scientific feat. They mapped the code that makes up all human DNA. Now they're still trying to figure out what it means, but they already know what it could mean for the future.

(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)

RESNICK: The world has completely changed and none of you know about it.

RAZ: So how is it going to change the world?

RESNICK: In a bunch of ways. The good news is it's going to help us immensely in treating cancer 'cause cancer is nothing more than a disease of the genome. It's a disease where one cell has certain changes, which cause it to get a little bit worse and then it reproduces. And by the time you've got a solid tumor, you've got this really heterogeneous population of cancerous cells. And if you sequence their genomes, they're a mess. And so right now, prior to genome sequencing, we're taking wild guesses at what the molecular basis of one's cancer is. And now going forward, what we're going to do is say, forget all of that, what is happening at the molecular level because this drug can target only those cancers that have the BRAF mutation, as an example.

RAZ: So where is it headed? What can you imagine in 10 or 20 years or beyond?

RESNICK: I think we will cure cancer. Genomics and sequencing at large will ultimately cure cancer. Whether that happens in 10 years or 50 years or more is difficult to say.

RAZ: That's incredible. I mean, you can say that with total confidence?

RESNICK: Absolutely. At some point, we'll snuff it out. I mean, people will still develop cancer, certainly, unless we get into genetic engineering of humans, which is something we ought to talk about, but it will be curable.