We don’t really understand why the immune system sometimes kills cancer in its early stages and at other times fails to kill it in the early stages.
Given that Jason Crawford previously wrote about transposons being more important in the aging process than commonly assumed, I would expect him to believe that they might also be more important for cancer than commonly assumed.
But I do agree that immunotherapy-based approaches are an existing paradigm that has the potential to actually solve many cancers.
Having theoretical gaps is not the same thing at all as being pre-theoretical, but I agree with you that there are definitely big gaps in our knowledge. I’m not confident that Jason knows what the “commonly assumed” role of transposons is among cancer biologists, I think he either needs to be more precise in his language here or quote a more reliable source for the views of this expert community or preferably both.
We don’t really understand why the immune system sometimes kills cancer in its early stages and at other times fails to kill it in the early stages.
Given that Jason Crawford previously wrote about transposons being more important in the aging process than commonly assumed, I would expect him to believe that they might also be more important for cancer than commonly assumed.
But I do agree that immunotherapy-based approaches are an existing paradigm that has the potential to actually solve many cancers.
Having theoretical gaps is not the same thing at all as being pre-theoretical, but I agree with you that there are definitely big gaps in our knowledge. I’m not confident that Jason knows what the “commonly assumed” role of transposons is among cancer biologists, I think he either needs to be more precise in his language here or quote a more reliable source for the views of this expert community or preferably both.
Thanks @ChristianKI, but I think you’re confusing me with someone else? I don’t know what transposons are and I haven’t written about them.
Maybe johnswentworth, from this one?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ui6mDLdqXkaXiDMJ5/core-pathways-of-aging#Transposons
Oh, it seems like I confused the two here.