Cancer is mostly man-made scientists suggest

[holy king]

Anyways, correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't we already pushing the natural human age limit even with cancer? I seem to recall reading that curing cancer would only increase life expectancy by 2-3 years in the developed world, simply because other ailments would quickly

Of course, that has nothing to do with the unnatural lifespan we can achieve, but it's worth taking into consideration.

it's the blood vessels that cant go on for much longer, yeah.

 

[Brighteye]

Thanks for bringing this back up. I skimmed the pop-sci article, and was thinking about reading the Nature paper. I wonder if they controlled for cancer being a disease of aging. I expect they would, because it's the first objection I can think of. We have more cancer, because we have more people who're not dying for other reasons.

I'm pretty sure they did control for aging, based on other summaries of the study that I've read.

This was reviewed on Radio 4 ('More or Less') some time ago. They were very unimpressed: cancer is not a modern disease. We might have exposure to a number of carcinogens that we never encountered before, but there has been cancer for a very long time.

I was at a talk by sir Richard Peto a week ago, and he showed us data that cancer rates have been dropping hugely over the last century. Of course, lung cancers might follow smoking rates with a delay, but stomach cancers have inexplicably dropped, single-handedly explaining almost all of the decrease.
Of course, when I say inexplicably, I mean that there's no solid evidence about why. We can easily guess that better and more hygienic food preparation is responsible, and deduce that the ancients had high rates of stomach cancer too.

Hardly anyone dies from TB in the western world nowadays.

TB is on the rise again in the UK.

 

[GoodGame]

One thing....did they ancients have as high of a risk of chromosome translocations as we have today?