Folding Forum

If we (humans) can cure all existing diseases, won't others develop?
Like Jeff Goldblum's character says in Jurassic park: "Nature always finds a way."

Don't get me wrong I think F@H is very useful and I wholeheartedly support it, but I'm just a bit curious.
Isn't disease (one of) nature's way(s) of regulating the population?

New forms and straits of diseases develop constantly. Much of those do not spread too far to cause any noticeable effects.

I do not think that it is a matter of development. It is mostly us humans who actually develop. We will live longer than any humans before us and those coming after us will live even longer. In the end, or at the end, there is always something that kills us and "death of old age" really is a death at old age. We are just pushing the barrier further and further.

Finding a cure often not only means finding a pill but instead to improve our way of live. Take cancer for example. There are many things one can do to avoid the risk of getting cancer and this hopefully will be one of the areas where Folding@Home can give researchers new insights. You would rather want your genes, or your daily food, to carry defence mechanisms instead of having to swallow a pill before it is almost too late.

I also disagree with your idea of nature controlling a population. If nature did not want any live on this planet then there would not be any. Instead, there is so much live that it fights one another and only that is why a little virus can kill a human (or an elephant or a whale). So who knows what we have to fight next.

I wasn't trying to imply nature's "out to wipe us out".

But isn't it so that there are certain mechanisms in place to control population of species?
When there's a lot of mice, more owls will come. Until the mice grow scarce, then the owls grow scarce as well. So the mice have another opportunity to grow in number again.

I think it's not too far out there to suppose sickness and disease is just another mechanism.

For example, couldn't it be that AIDS has developed over the last decades because a lot of other illnesses can be cured with pennicilin nowadays?
This might be a simplistic representation of things (I'm not a scientist), but maybe you get my drift...

I do get your drift but I think that there is no control in progress. Of course there is God, Allah, and not to forget Pinky&The Brain, and they are controlling everything but perhaps that is not the answer you are looking for. What mice need in order to grow is not so much the absence of a predator but first of all food. Even when there are predators around is it possible for a species to grow. Are mice then controlled by their food? Probably not. In fact it is more likely that a species controls itself if anything, like some predators who primarily only hunt the sick and the weak, or even eat only the dead. Owls that kill all mice within their territory and thereby extinguish themselves hardly control the population of mice nor their own.

I do not know the history of AIDS but as far as I know is it an old disease that exists for example in cats and monkeys, too. How it developed to become such a deadly diseases for us humans is likely our own fault as our population grows in size and density, making it easier for any disease to spread and evolve.

So what is it all about? I think it is just chaos and we have found ourself in the middle of a stable area of this chaos. We could get hit by an asteroid and within hours and days the entire planet's surface would be chaos again like it was before live started.

Evolution will make new diseases which aren't affected by the medicine (those who are affected will die and those who aren't will live). At least this is what happen with diseases which are of/by parasites. Depends of course, but that's what happen with antibiotics and I assume something similar will happen with other medicines.

funny to see that people still attribute conscious thought to abstracts as "nature"

we humans are the ones thinking everything to death, the rest of the universe just IS and evolves

I do not attribute conscious thought to Nature ( or God, Allah , Pinky & the Brain), not even some sort sort of control.
Through evolution species grow extinct and new or adapted species emerge. This may happen through series of random occurrences, but the results are that species adapt to circumstances.
So why not diseases?

I find humans are so busy trying to defeat/postpone death, there's way too little attention for the quality of life.
Did it ever occur to you that maybe so many older people get Alzheimer nowadays, because people live that much longer than before? What other diseases will befall us when we all grow to be, say, 130 years old?

To be sure: I'm not saying we have to go back to times where everybody dies at 50, I just have an interest in discussing these things

I do not think people fold just to become immortal (...). I think we all find the death of our parents and grand parents harder to accept than the death of a mere stranger. Even when AIDS is a major disease and also everyone above 40 is afraid of getting cancer, seem many to be interested in finding a cure for Alzheimer and other "old people"-diseases rather than for these other, more threatening ones. It is about whom we love and whos quality of life we are trying to improve and less about protecting ourself or becoming immortal.

There's no doubt that he death of a parent or grand-parent is hard to accept, but we recover and can go back to living our lives. In many ways, Alzheimer's disease is worse than death. Having a relative become less intelligent than our house-pets brings real emotional devastation to entire families. They can require love and care for many, many years and we cannot just go back to living our everyday lives.

sdack wrote:I do not think people fold just to become immortal (...). I think we all find the death of our parents and grand parents harder to accept than the death of a mere stranger. Even when AIDS is a major disease and also everyone above 40 is afraid of getting cancer, seem many to be interested in finding a cure for Alzheimer and other "old people"-diseases rather than for these other, more threatening ones. It is about whom we love and whos quality of life we are trying to improve and less about protecting ourself or becoming immortal.

i think youre greatly underestimating human extesentialism, ego, selfishness, basically the whole of humanity. our history is filled with trying to live forever. survival of consciousness the basis of all religion in history. and if we can live forever physically, best thing - taking it with us when we go

people dont want to change the way they live. they want to abuse their bodies, until they become self aware of their mortality (midlife crisis or new children) then take a magic pill that undoes everything they spent their entire lives doing to themselves. its the american way. can you imagine living (for want of a better word) your entire life in fear of the repercussions of every minute action you may make. if i leave the house i might get in a car wreck but if i stay home the wires could melt in the wall and the house can burn down around me... youd curl up in a ball completely paralyzed. ok a little more realistic, say i want to do this or try this but it could affect me in this way 50 years from now. we'd be an unfulfilled lot. what we need desperately is structure. overstimulation in every aspect of our lives in combination with instant gratification to stop self reflection. welcome to the information age. we'll all be too busy enjoying ourselves to think about the ramifications until the end, and then expect someone else clean it up.

sdack wrote:So what is it all about? I think it is just chaos and we have found ourself in the middle of a stable area of this chaos. We could get hit by an asteroid and within hours and days the entire planet's surface would be chaos again like it was before live started.

we're not mysteriously in the middle of a stable area. we've evolved a complex social construct over centuries. even now, we're not here because we want to better the world in some abstract way, to save everybody. maybe a couple are. most of us are here to save ourselves or someone we know. our kids? unenlightened self interest. primal instinct refined and complicated by intelligent thought. The human animal is a savage beast. capable of terrifying things. yes all you need to break down the social barriers and then every man for himself is an asteriod, or a hurricane.... or a black friday sale then stand back and watch them trample each other to death.