One of my friends passed away earlier this year due to cancer and one of the questions I've kept wondering about has been about our slow progress in curing cancer. (Which admittedly stems from my own utter ignorance on the subject!)
We could and should be moving faster. I'm dying anyway, so if a treatment doesn't work or even harms me, I'm not much worse off than I was before the treatment.
A lot of that "slow progress" is due to the FDA's intransigence and conservatism, even in the face of patients like me who are dying already anyway: https://jakeseliger.com/2023/07/22/i-am-dying-of-squamous-ce...
See also "The dead and dying at the gates of oncology clinical trials" https://jakeseliger.com/2024/01/29/the-dead-and-dying-at-the... and my wife on what trying to enroll in clinical trials is like from the patient's perspective: "Please be dying, but not too quickly: a clinical trial story" https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/please-be-dying-but-not-...
We could and should be moving faster. I'm dying anyway, so if a treatment doesn't work or even harms me, I'm not much worse off than I was before the treatment.