In the seriously great news department, pancreatic cancer is expected to pass colorectal cancer as the second biggest cause of cancer-related death by 2030. Yes, it’s great news.
To see why, look back to the beginning of the mid-19th century. At the time tuberculosis and pneumonia killed far more Americans than surely lethal cancer in its various forms. The reality is that most didn’t die of cancer back then exactly because tuberculosis, pneumonia and others like it struck Americans long before cancer could take their lives.
Which calls for a re-read of the opening sentence of this opinion piece. That pancreatic cancer is poised to move ahead of colorectal is a sign that detection of and treatment of colorectal has advanced sufficiently such that people aren’t dying from it in the way they used to. Progress.
The Wall Street Journal’s Brianna Abbott reports that a tragically slim 3 percent of late-stage pancreatic cancer patients survive. The numbers are horrifying, which means we can hope that someday, hopefully much sooner than later, pancreatic cancer is overtaken. It’s possible we’re inching closer to just such a reality as you’re reading this.
Abbott reports that Revolution Medicine’s daraxonrasib has shown success when it comes to keeping pancreatic cancer patients alive. We can only hope. And then we can think about the bigger meaning of a drug that’s still in clinical trial stage.
As with all advances of the technological, transportation, and health variety, the inputs necessary to create daraxonrasib were always there for us. What we lacked was knowledge. Every advance involves all sorts of experiments, most of which don’t get us anywhere. Which is the point.
Knowledge isn’t gained when innovative minds experiment only to confirm what they already know. True advance is a function of surprise, as in the surprise creation of knowledge. But it once again requires endless, costly and failure-laden experimenting to attain. Along these lines, it’s no stretch to say daraxonrasib and its potential to restrain a known killer like pancreatic cancer only came to be after enormous sums of money were spent.
Remember this as you contemplate government and the enormous amounts of spending it oversees. Governments don’t attain their spending power from Pluto, rather it’s an effect of their taxable access to the wealth we produce along with market expectations that they’ll enjoy similarly expansive access to future wealth creation such that they can borrow against our future earnings and wealth creation now.
Revolution Medicines is the proverbial “seen,” as is daraxonrasib, but what knowledge hasn’t been created over the years and decades thanks to excessive taxation and spending? Revolution Medicines has intrepid shareholders that took big risks in backing it, but how many Revolution-like companies were never created due to relatively less capital being matched with live minds desperately trying to create a better future through knowledge attainment.
Never forget that before it became an afterthought, pneumonia was the “Captain of Man’s Death.” In consideration of its former lethality that was much greater than that of pancreatic cancer today, it’s no insight to say that in time cancer of the pancreas will morph from killer to afterthought too. The only barrier to the transformation is once again knowledge.
Which is why what’s been written hopefully is not viewed in a partisan light. Governments grow no matter who is in power, and the growth consumes wealth that would otherwise be matched with knowledge creators. As pancreatic cancer’s ongoing lethality indicates, there’s a human cost to all of the federal government’s consumption.
