Very sad, of course. He's only 59. I've gotta admit that I'm also a bit angry. The war on cancer is 40 years old and we are still so far away from solving the problem(s).
Jobs, more than likely, would have survived if he didn't try "alternative" cancer therapies. Banks did everything by the book and his outcome is poor, but at least he tried properly.
It was actually not quite as bad as it was represented in the press. The cancer was diagnosed in 2003. He avoided surgery for nine months and had surgery in 2004 - when it was still stage 1. That surgery was apparently successful. The cancer had certainly not metastasised in any detectable way at that point.
From stuff his family has said, and from what his biographer said about his interviews with Jobs, the primary driver for the delay was an almost phobic fear of surgery rather than "alternative medicine will cure me". This is surprisingly common from conversations I've had with some cancer treatment folk. I knew a family member who unfortunately had similar feelings :-/
The kind of cancer Jobs had was a rare and slow growing pancreatic cancer. Normally if you get diagnosed with pancreatic cancer you are in surgery later that bleeding day if at all possible. For pNET tumors longer delays of weeks or even months aren't unknown (not recommended either mind - but not insanely stupid).
(as a separate point - I love how all the reporting around Job's cancer was that it was a "rare cancer" presented in the the "ohhh rare and scary sense"... if you have to get pancreatic cancer a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor like Jobs's is the one you want to get).
The alternative medicine didn't make it worse in of itself.
The delay in surgery may have made it worse - but it's not certain. The five year survival rate for that cancer, when treated by surgery, is still only 61% at stage 1 (see http://www.cancer.org/Cancer/PancreaticCancer/DetailedGuide/...). Steve lasted nearly nine years.
Was the 9 month delay in surgery a sensible thing? Almost certainly not. But the real story was a long way from the "Killed by alternative medicine" line that hit the press. Even if Jobs had had surgery the day he was diagnosed, it would most likely have ended the same way.
The 5-year survival for the earliest stage (I) neuroendocrine pancreatic cancer treated with surgery is 61%. The latest stage (IV) is 15%. Stage II puts you at about 50%.
That just doesn't seem like he "more than likely" would have survived to me, but looks more like a coin flip. And that was with the "good" pancreatic cancer.
On the back of the liver he janked by being a billionare able to own property near all the major transplant hospitals. Not to mention, 9 years of torture and misery with the last 2-3 more or less being a housebound invalid.
Sadly I think we squandered that chance. We had one cubic mile of oil. We're half way through it. The rest is being burnt off at record rates. This was a one time energy bounty.
We're mining ores with tiny percentages of what we want in them nowadays and at increasing energy cost.
We had a bounty of natural resources that we could have focused to get off this planet and become an interplanetary species. I suspect we will never get there as we've squandered these resources and overpopulated the planet beyond carrying capacity.
If you're waiting for a miracle solution, or believe alternatives will solve everything I recommend you study the principles of energy return on energy investment.
It makes me sad but I think we will never colonize other planets.
There's no such thing as an interplanetary species, barring some startling developments in physics. At the timescales it takes to travel to other solar systems, populations of colonists would be separated enough to speciate, especially given the radical differences in environment and the genetic drift of the early colony ships anyway.
Wouldn't it be quite feasible for humans even using current tech to go to the Moon, Mars, potentially moons of Jupiter or Saturn, and Venus? That would be interplanetary. Interstellar, perhaps not.
(I agree interplanetary would do a lot better with plausible tech of the next 50-100 years, but there's no reason not to get started today. Thank you, Elon Musk!)
Maybe, but wouldn't the same issues apply? After all, you still wouldn't have people going from planet to planet often enough for there to be much interbreeding. In any case, colonizing the rest of the solar system is fairly pointless since there aren't any other habitable planets.
To seriously colonize other planets would presumably mean we've solved the LEO lift problem (elevator? even easier on Mars, the Moon, etc.), have some nuclear-powered shuttles running around the planets, etc. At that point I think there would be at least as much contact between worlds as between continents in the 1500s. It might be largely one-way (Earth to Colonies), though.
Shipping reproductive material (either as information, or embryos, or frozen eggs/sperm) would also be fairly realistic.
The main reasons I can see for colonizing other planets are political (Earth is dominated by a certain kind of nation state, I'd happily live in a remote part of Earth if it would get me out from under that, as long as the right 5k people went with me...), or the spiritual/moral/whatever drive to do it because it can be done.
The fact that no one aside from small scientific installations have colonized Antarctica, which is orders of magnitude more habitable than the Moon or Mars, makes that claim rather doubtful.
For yourself, the best things you can do today is massively reduce your sugar (and high-fructose corn syrup, which is nearly identical) intake[1] and increase excercise[2]. Reducing sugar will cause you to increase other macro and micro nutrients that are healthier (which may help) and most likely cause you to loose weight if you need to (which will help).
Unfortunately, until public policy on diet (which is set by the people responsible for selling more corn and sugar) changes, it's not going to get better.
Why don't you link to peer-reviewed studies that definitively prove that corn and sugar cause cancer. It's quite disturbing and outrageous that you're using Iain's cancer to scare the public for political gain.
I have nothing to gain, so I think it odd that you would accuse me of doing this for political gain. I'm curious what political gain you think I could gain. I'm much more concerned about my kids growing up in a world where they can't escape sugar and HFCS being added to everything (including meat!) and the impact it will have on them and their kids.
Right now, there is no peer reviewed literature that definitively proves the sugar/cancer link. At best, there might be correlation.
Unfortunately, it is very difficult to get any funding for anything that might imply sugar is bad. The US, under pressure from the sugar lobby, threatened to pull $400M in WHO funding if they published a report saying "Too much sugar has bad side effect, you should limit consumption to 10% of your calories"[1][2][3]. The report was never published. This is made worse by 30 years of dogma, the fact that the FDA won't regulate substances that cause chronic diseases, and the conflict of interest the USDA has with coming up with what we "should" eat when their charter is to sell more crops.
I'm also not saying that if you don't eat sugar, you won't get cancer. Statistics apply to populations, not individuals. All I'm saying is there is probably a link between sugar and cancer, and, given sugar provides no positive nutritional value, cutting it out is probably a smart thing to do.
My heart goes out to Mr. Banks and his family and friends, just as much as my heart goes out to every cancer victim. As a society, we can do better.
It would be impossible to conduct such a study, as a causative study of this nature would be unethical under every established modern regime for scientific and medical ethics. Even a correlative study would be considered scientifically and medically unethical if a significant deviation is shown from the control group at any point during the study.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Cancer
The first commercial microprocessor was released in the same year:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_4004
Solutions? Ideas? The list in my mind is starting to get painfully long:
Randy Pausch (47), Steve Jobs (56), Ian M Banks ...