Earthshaking News – Cancer Cured?

George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regularly scheduled KVMR radio commentary broadcast on 30 January 2019.  An edited version of this commentary appeared in the 2feb19 Union.]

Standby for the next tranche of earthshaking news.  You know, the kind of report that promises to make a big impact on the lives of each of us.  Well, there’s another one of these that has come out, but has yet to make a big splash in the headlines, which today are probably more interested in keeping the latest Trump/Pelosi brouhaha at a boil.

Remember the earthshaking news back in 1989 when a couple of scientists claimed to have cracked the code on cold fusion (here).  Fusion energy is the holy grail of humanity’s search for a clean and virtually limitless source of power to make our civilization hum without polluting the earth with fossil fuels residues and/or fission power catastrophes.  From our high school science class most of us remember that fission power is generated by splitting atoms which releases the desired energy, along with a bunch of deadly radiation and radioactive stuff that needs to be contained and then disposed of safely.  Today fission reactors around the world power everything from electric grids to big carriers and missile submarines.  The other bad part about fission reactors is that their operation must be constantly controlled lest they go into an unstable meltdown like the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

Fusion energy comes from hydrogen atoms being fused into the heavier helium atoms in an environment of extreme gravitational pressure and ten million-degree temperatures such as occur naturally in the cores of stars including our sun.  If for some reason the pressure is released or the temperature goes down, fusion stops instantly.  And the only bad byproduct of controlled fusion is some high energy neutrons that tend to corrode anything that attempts to contain the process.  Well, the cold fusion experiments ended as an embarrassing bust, and to date no one has made much progress on controlling ‘hot’ or thermonuclear fusion.  It’s turning out to be much more difficult to contain and harness on earth what goes on naturally all over the universe.  So the arrival of fusion power has yet to shake our world. (more here)

Now, get ready for today’s earth-shaker – seatbelts please.  Israeli scientists announce that they have a demonstrated a cure for cancer.  This ongoing development, to be completed “in a year’s time”, is reported in the Jerusalem Post and Forbes magazine.  The scientists work at Accelerated Evolution Biotechnologies Ltd (AEBi), a pharmaceutical company located in Ness Ziona, Israel.  The reported cure is more than a bit mind-blowing since it can be targeted to attack all types of cancer cells.  And once it kills them, the cure is permanent, there will be no lurking cancer stem cells left that will later bloom into a full-blown cancer that is so common to the disease.

But that’s not all.  Using a multi-target toxin drug they named MuTaTo, AEBi reports that “Our cancer cure will be effective from day one, (the process) will last … a few weeks and will have no or minimal side-effects at a much lower cost than most other treatments on the market.” (more here)

So there you have it – the next promise of a real earth-shaker that will save the 1 in 5 men and the 1 in 6 women who will develop cancer during their lifetimes.  MuTaTo will then go into clinical testing and the usual bureaucratic obstacle course.  You can read more about it with the links posted on my website.  But overall and so far, what’s not to like about such uplifting news?

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

 

Comments

[Gregory]

That caught my eye on Monday, when I followed a link to the Jerusalem Post article.
https://www.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/A-cure-for-cancer-Israeli-scientists-say-they-think-they-found-one-578939

I asked my wife's oncologist circa 2000 when he thought an off-switch for cancers might be found and he guessed at the time maybe 10 years... looks like 20 could be the case... but it won't be real until it gets rolled out beyond the laboratory, beyond the research hospitals, at a price mere mortals and their insurers can afford.

My first wife died about eighteen months after her diagnosis... so ten years was as good (meaning bad) as one hundred or never... but it would have really hurt for her to be the last one to die of metastatic ovarian cancer before a cure was found.

I'd guess if everything goes well and there are not impossible to predict Really Bad Side Effects, I'll expect there to be some chance for people I know to get this in another five years. But those are big IFs. Would I pay $10,000 out of pocket for this for me? In a second. Would I pay $100,000 out of pocket? Probably not. $1,000,000? I don't have a million bucks laying around so definitely not.