It's one thing. It's a mutation in the DNA that causes uncontrolled cell division. You unlock the key to that, you unlock everything. Anything else from these fucking science bros is just language games of classification.

EDIT: Apart from the thoughtful replies from TerminalEncounter and HiImThomasPynchon, the snark in the rest of the comments is through the roof. From the same people, btw, that will shout "ACAB right now," "guillotine capitalists right now!," "FALC right now," "gulag them all right now!" As though those are more realistic than what I'm envisioning. No wonder online/western leftists never get anything accomplished. Ironically, you're the behaving exactly like kind of people that would have made snarky comments in the past like "lol aboslish slavery, yeah I wish we could do that!" or "give women the right to vote, yeah if only it were that easy!" It's a weird kind of regressive reactionary thinking (except of course for things they personally want to get done, then it's "we can do it right now"). It's weird, with homelessness, the solution is "simply give them housing" but with this it's "it's more complicated honey..." Fucking pathetic...

  • aaro [they/them, she/her]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    We know that cancer is not socially constructed and we can be sure with extremely high confidence that future societies will not view it as socially constructed. Slavery and women's suffrage were issues of how people treated each other, police abolition and FALC are also issues of how we treat each other, but a cure to cancer is a fight not against each other but of us against the laws of nature. If we had the technology to cure cancer and it wasn't being distributed, then cancer would be a social issue, but as of now I very much don't think we have the technology to cure cancer.

    Cancer is hard. It takes a million different forms and lives in a million different places. It is astronomically harder to detect cancer early than it is to find a needle in a haystack, and even when found it's very hard to remove or kill in all but the simplest cases. It can come from anything from getting too much sun to eating bacon to flying in an airplane. It is made of exactly the same stuff as the rest of you with the exception of a literal handful of molecules. I think we'll beat it some day but we need way more advancement as a species first, for now we'll have to tolerate chemotherapy and occasional breakthroughs like Cuba's lung cancer vaccine.

    • electricaltape [none/use name]
      hexagon
      ·
      2 years ago

      Cancer is hard.

      Yeah I get it. But the fucked up thing is that I can imagine a world where cancer is cured but capitalism still chugs along (i.e. cures for only those that can afford it) and it's communism that seems harder...