Mass Sequencing: How We Go About Defeating The Cancer Industrial Complex
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Today marks the anniversary of my Mother’s diagnosis with cancer. Mom survived it — twice — but it left it scars on her and on our family. I was eight when she was first diagnosed and in high school when she was diagnosed a second time. Cancer is never far from my mind.
But many were not so lucky. In high school my friend Jillian Beach died of cancer before she turned sixteen. One of my few friends in prep school — fellow rocketeer Ryan Sebastian — was killed by cancer before he turned 30. It’s difficult for me to write about Ryan without getting upset so I’ll just quote what others already wrote: “In 2014 Ryan joined SpaceX, got married to his long time girlfriend Caitlin and was diagnosed with cancer.” His son Charlie was born premature and then Ryan died nine days later.
To say that Ryan’s death has had an effect on me is to be understated in the extreme. I remember us working on a rocket motor in 2004 and him shying me away because the material could cause cancer.
Over the years I’ve been smeared by foreign-backed actors who see my interests in genomics as somehow sinister. My initial support for Joe Biden had much to do with his commitment to build a health DARPA and with it, a promise that we might be able to finally address the scourge of cancer.
Unfortunately, he elected to bring on the very Chinese-Israeli friendly and Epstein pal, Eric Lander, who was promptly fired for his maltreatment of staff. Lander returned to the Broad Institute, a very Chinese-Israeli friendly genomics institute which has its own problems.
Perhaps we should be doing a bit more vetting and a lot more thinking about the incentives.
A recent paper shows that a lot of cancer researchers are, in fact, frauds.
Here’s the mention from The New York Times:
A prominent cancer center affiliated with Harvard said it will ask medical journals to retract six research papers and correct dozens of others after a British scientist and blogger found that work by some of its top executives was rife with duplicated or manipulated data.
The center, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, one of the nation’s foremost cancer treatment and research facilities, moved quickly in recent days to address allegations of faulty data in 58 studies, many of them influential, compiled by a British molecular biologist, Sholto David.
In many cases, Dr. David found, images in the papers had been stretched, obscured or spliced together in a way that suggested deliberate attempts to mislead readers. The studies he flagged included some published by Dana-Farber’s chief executive, Dr. Laurie Glimcher, and its chief operating officer, Dr. William Hahn.
Dr. Glimcher is the mother of none other than Congressman Jake Auchincloss. It’s not hard to imagine that Glimcher’s salary — $3.6m+! — presumably helped Congressman Auchincloss come up in Boston’s rarefied circles. Privilege, privilege, privilege!
Dr. Hahn is on the Board of the very Chisraeli Broad Center. There’s a much darker side to Eli Broad than is conventionally talked about. Could it be that he’s a mob front? I suspect as times goes on we’ll learn that the Broad has a lot more problems than we care to admit. If you want to launder a lot of money it helps to have real estate, and art, and really big problems like cancer which require gobs of money don’t you know.
There’s really only one way to really take on cancer — population-wide, full genome-wide sequencing.
We’d take those who were diagnosed with cancer and compare their genomes to those without it to identify all the known variants.
To some extent this is already happening but we should be sequencing everyone and doing our geno-pheno match. (This is essentially what a genome-wide associated study is.)
Overtime we’d wind up solving a lot more than cancer. We’d break the thing driving up health care costs — asymmetry of information.
Such a thing would be revolutionary.
A lot of cancer doctors would lose their jobs and sinecures. Oh well.
Let’s break Big Cancer.
Let’s end the Cancer Industrial Complex.
We deserve better than these buildings.