My point wasn't about hope, I "hope" to live a life without years of agony. Living through years of chemo on to live a diminished or slightly less-painful life with a looming chance of the cancer re-occurring isn't a life I "hope" to live.
That first link looks like a long-winded way of saying "LOL who knows". I did find its conclusion pretty interesting, where it was suggested that cinnamon ultimately comes from an ancient Chinese word for "spice". Now what other meaning does the word "spice" carry these days? Synthetic cannabinoids!
I recommend Raph Koster's latest book "Postmortems" for a digest of his experience developing Ultima Online, including some background on the ecology that never shipped. https://www.raphkoster.com/games/books/
Do you not write emails, search the web, or do writing on a computer of any kind? I wouldn’t be so quick to judge here. You don’t know what they are really doing on their keyboard all day. Maybe typing is all we have due to a physical disability that limits mobility and communication in other ways. There are a lot of possibilities beyond “writing shit code”.
It's way more than $100,000 a year too. My treatment alone (Keytruda, every 3 weeks) is around $300,000 a year; about double the price the company will quote you if you ask, because they don't estimate the cost it takes to get blood work, get seen by an oncologist, and then get the treatment administrated to you safely by a trained nurse ready to respond to any adverse events that may spontaneously occur during infusion. However, thanks to current health care law in the US there are caps on the amount of out-of-pocket expenses your insurance can charge you. I have run of the mill bigco health insurance and my personal max out-of-pocket cost (after premiums, deductibles, etc.) is at least two orders of magnitude less than the cost to insurance.
I am being treated with pembrolizumab for metastatic MSI-H CRC (I'm in my late 20s). Last year the cancer rapidly metastasized further, covering my abdomen in tumors. Prognosis was not good to say the least.
It took around 12 weeks for the treatment to "kick in", but at that point tumor regression became rapid. Every CT scan since has shown significant reduction in the abdominal tumors until my last one a few weeks ago; there is no longer any sign of cancer in my abdomen. Overall, it went from "countless" visible tumors ranging from a few mm to several cms each in size, to nothing visible on CT today. o_O
Who knows what the future will bring. I'm trying to be optimistic but I'm also realistic about the statistics here. However, going from my literal death bed where I was in horrible pain suffering for 24 hours a day to quasi-normalcy in a matter of several months blows my mind when I think about it. It did give me horrible colitis (yay for autoimmune side-effects!), but I'll take that over a painful death any day of the week. The colitis is bad enough that they had to discontinue the treatment for a while.
tldr; Science rules. Side effects suck. And a sincere thank you to anyone reading who is or was ever involved in cancer research.
