The Wonders of Medicine

Julian Simon once noted that at the turn of the twentieth century you had a 50:50 chance that the advice a doctor gave you would do you more harm than good. Now I believe that within my children's lifetime certain cancers will be curable.

It turns out that melanoma, the most dangerous type of skin cancer, involves melanocytes, the cells that help color hair and skin.

So researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston decided to investigate what happens when these cells become depleted, allowing hair to go gray.

``Preventing the graying of hair is not our goal,'' said senior researcher Dr. David E. Fisher. ``What we really want is to come up with treatments for melanoma.''

Update: Dave points out my error made in haste: certainly cancer is curable now with earlier detection methods and radiation and chemotherapy, making death from most forms of cancer much less common. What I meant to say was that these trends will eventually make it so that death from certain forms of cancer will be unheard of.

 

Comments

[Dave]

Forgive my ignorance, but I thought certain cancers were already curable, either with radiation therapy or surgery?