Common C-Cure
(Common Cure for Cancer)
© Paul Kreitl
In terms of medical advances we live in a wonderful time. The focus on cancer detection, diagnosis, and cure has never been greater and consequently there are more survivors than ever before.
Still, there are numerous victims daily who lose their battle to this devastating set of diseases. The battles are fearful because the advanced stages of cancers are so painful physically and emotionally.
There are many types of cancer which are very curable even in advanced stages through surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy. It is a very exciting time.
This article concerns two aspects of cancer – a common cure to all types of cancer and a common prevention to cancer. There are activities at the genetic level in our cells that all cancers have in common – that is what defines them. And there are dietary, exercise, emotional, and spiritual prescriptions that undoubtedly help some people in not getting some cancers. All of these are helpful primarily because there is no common cure yet. Many people dream of a world without cancer just as past generations dreamt of a world without smallpox or polio.
I don’t have a special insight developed by years of research and study. What I have is a process that the C-cure can be found. In short it is through tapping into the collective wisdom of our planet and aggregating the most salient possibilities found in our published research.
Key to the success of such a massive undertaking is using artificial intelligence and the people connections afforded through the Internet. AI has been around for decades. I even used it in my final Master’s project in the early 1980s at IndianaUniversity. AI has had much attention and some success in real life and science fiction, but we’ve only begun to tap into this potential. The hardware processing and storage as well as application and database software advances are now at the cusp of being able to do what is needed.
Using the Internet to generate and share ideas is also not new. Even before the World Wide Web the Internet was used in the military and academia to explore new ideas and solve complex problems. With the web came information sharing and more recently social outlets. There are many examples of bringing together like-minded people to focus on a common discipline. You can count among these virtual choirs, massively multiplayer online role–playing games, and even global tech support.
Combining these two in an iterative way is what can lead to the common C-cure. This will create a social and technological organism of sorts where the ideas of the masses will be captured as rules for the AI engine which will in turn learn to seek out ideas and research findings among openly published documents. The findings will then be fed back to the populace who will then generate and refine ideas which go into the further training of the AI engine. And so the cycle will continue.
It will take our planet’s collective wisdom to solution the best answer. Below are some features of such a system which can start as guiding rules or principles.
The processing power needed for the AI engine will be immense. It will probably start with a very powerful minicomputer and quickly grow into a mainframe system then into a supercomputer. At that point the host configuration will need to be broken and grid computing will take over. This will then give way to a massively parallel grid of many types of computers some running constantly on this project and some running as time on the systems allow.
The operating systems used to coordinate the processing on this global grid will be large also, but several endeavors have already been created and implemented, eg. the SETI@Home Project which runs on about 3 million home computers. The Big Data database technology will also be key in combining the huge amounts of data gathered. However, Google Big Table, Google Spanner, and Hadoop are good examples of what is possible.
The AI engine itself will need to be extremely complex. Limiting this project to one human language or one computer language will risk missing valuable ideas and findings. It must be able to understand most if not all modern languages and be agnostic to the many computer languages being used today.
Even though many people will be involved in the idea creation towards the Common C-Cure, a large IT staff will also be needed, especially in the beginning, to get the whole system operational.
The excitement from this project has given me many sleepless nights. My personal bouts with cancer have been a huge motivator for me. I have discussed this with more people than I can count and I appreciate all of their inputs. They have been very motivating as well. What’s at stake here are peoples lives, both in duration and quality. The task is immense, but we as a world are up to the challenge!