this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2026
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Pretty disingenuous to compare cancer, one of the most heavily studied medical conditions on the planet, to this. Just because there's no cure to being made of cells? It's not that simple.
What is disingenuous about it? If all the money they dump into some things can't solve it, and rich people still die young, then it isn't a question of who gets an illness that determines if it gets solved.
To be fair though, cancer as a whole gets a lot of study dollars but it's incredibly complicated and every form of cancer varies wildly in how it affects the body, how best to treat it, how to screen for it, who are at risk, etc.
The comment you replied to was referring to a single variant that affects only men (incorrectly associating it with Steve jobs, but regardless), not the entirety of cancer writ large.
Studying bone cancer, skin cancer, and studying prostate cancer etc for example are wholly separate things and shouldn't really be put under the same bucket in this context.
It was intended as a list, cancer that only affects men, not cured. Steve jobs, a very rich person, still died young despite the money for the best medical care... "modern" medicine is really still in the dark ages. It's come a long way, so it seems so advanced, but the percent of the human body and how it functions that we actually understand is well below 10. Most things we just trial and error solutions without much understanding of what is really going on.
I'm uninformed, but isn't cancer largely a mammalian feature?
That's a good question. I don't know for sure. I just meant to imply that thinking about cancers in terms of "cures" isn't a very useful way to approach the matter.
A cursory search suggests that reptiles and birds do get cancer, just at a noticeably reduced rate. Maybe something to do with metabolism? Or a side effect of bodies capable of live birth? Dunno.
I've also heard that whales and elephants get less cancers than we would expect from animals (or I guess mammals) of their size.
I'm just saying this from memory so I may be wrong, but I think size will be a big factor for reduced cancer in small animals. For whales and elephants they have had to gain extra adaptations to handle cancer which accounts for the difference.
Cancer isn't directly tied to the nu,ber of cells. It's the type. Cancer shows up in places where cells replaced most often. Some cells are long lived, others not so much. The more replication you have, the greater the chance of a mutation that ends up being classified as cancer. So while a whale is huge, a lot of that size comes from things like muscle and fat, which don't replicate once mature (I believe). So the complexity of the human body causes it to have more things that need to replicate, and thus more opportunities for cancer. And then of course, plenty of otther things we do that bump up our chances...