No I think you’re looking at this wrong.

They thought too much sun was bad for you because back then tanned skin was considering a mark of being poor and pale skin was a mark of being wealthy since rich people didn’t have to work outside.

They also had puritanical Victorian notions of modesty and covering up.

There was no knowledge linking sun exposure to cancer or negative health effects. People in the past indeed were ignorant on many things.

I don't think that was because of UV exposure or anything related. Look at Bedouin tribes even today. They wrap up head to toe, man and woman and child alike, not to avoid tanning but because prolonged exposure to direct infrared will fry you like an egg.

I grew up in the same general region as Wilder, and we sought shade not to avoid sunburn. We were all chestnut brown by the end of summer anyway. It's because the direct sunlight on an August afternoon was brutally hot, and you wanted as little of it to hit your skin as possible.

> before the 50s and 60s everyone knew you should cover up and women wore bonnets. That too much sun was bad for you.

I'd say partly true, mostly false. As sibling comment mentions, much of this was driven by fashion and class etc. and not from some fundamental understanding of damaging UV exposure.

Furthermore there was research that was trendy at the time called "heliotherapy" [0] where all sorts of diseases were believed curable by sun exposure, including smallpox, TB, etc.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_therapy#History

We developed creams that stopped sunburn, but were still great at getting you cancer. A lot of the ads from 70s and 80s talked about how they stopped UVB but let the tanning UVA through! So yes, they didn't burn, but the long term cancer rates exploded, along with all the skin aging.

So it's not that they ignored the all knowledge. I blame most of it on the rather detrimental tech advancement. Like cigarettes with filters: now safer (except you can smoke more now, and the cancer risk is still a disaster)

> We act like people in the past were ignorant but people in the 50s and 60s were just a very special type of arrogant,

I’d be curious to know if tetraethyllead in gasoline has anything to do with people from that time being cavalier about exposure to the sun, or if the science was just not there to make the connection between sun exposure and skin cancer.

Everybody who's not been raised in a bubble knows the sun burns

It's only recently that we had space for completely retarded ideas like "staying in the sun doesn't hurt you" or "sunscreen causes cancer"

This was my experience. Years ago I travelled to New Zealand in what would be their spring time. We stayed in Wanaka but also travelled around Twizel, Tekapo etc.

Although it was pretty sunny with clear blue skies, the air temperature was fairly chilly (shirt, jumper and fleece cold - and I'm Scottish so used to cold weather) and I started to burn. I was warned about this, and the probability of high UV exposure at altitude by the locals and family, and was advised to apply a high factor sunblock whilst roaming around the higher elevations of New Zealand's South Island, which I did.

I didn't know about the UV index or what it meant until like three years ago. It blows my mind I went that long without understanding. It was actually wonderful to learn that I could just see if I needed sunblock based on a 0-10 scale.

We never wore sunscreen as kids because we didn't burn. I probably have had three sunburns in my life. Learned once I became an adult that that wasn't sound logic...

I’ve always wondered about this. I have fair skin, and I tend to burn somewhat easily in very sunny environments like the beach.

However, I’ve never gotten so much as a whisper of sunburn / suntan / anything on an actually cloudy day where sun wasn’t hitting me directly. Is the damage a different type that’s imperceptible? Or is this a public health comms strategy where they assume people will see a single cloud in the sky and decide it’s fine to skip sunscreen, so they talk about how you should slather yourself with sunscreen 24/7, even if the sun is obscured?

Misleading comment.

From https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ijc.35463

> Cutaneous melanoma (CM) accounted for around 331,700 cancer cases globally in 2022

> An estimated 267,353 (95% uncertainty intervals [UI]: 242,818, 278,638) CM cases were UVR attributable globally in 2022

UVR = Ultraviolet radiation

Cutaneous melanoma (CM) is the vast majority of melanoma cases in the US at least:

> The percentages of melanomas that were cutaneous, ocular, mucosal, and unknown primaries were 91.2%, 5.2%, 1.3%, and 2.2%, from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9781962/

tl;dr ~80% of Cutaneous melanoma cases are attributable to UV exposure.

I believe both were done with Keytruda. Control was Keytruda without the mRNA treatment.

So this should answer the question of "how much better is this with the best we currently have".

Hope this helps:

https://archive.ph/SQQ97

One of the leading problems is that we don't know how to pick the right neoantigens (mutant cancer proteins) which can trigger the optimal immune response.

Moderna used a simple heuristic, "how likely is this antigen to show up on the cell surface?" which makes sense, since an antigen has to show up on the cell surface for the immune system to see it. But there's so much missing from this model, and we just don't have enough data. Failures in clinical trials of mRNA vaccines may well be caused by this problem. (Yes, this is a good problem for AI, if we can get enough data).

> and with few exceptions

Those few exceptions have been monumental in how they've changed cancer treatment. Skin cancer has been particularly well treated with immunotherapy, but other cancers have also benefited from the exact same research and drugs (as it turns out, the specific mutations the immunotherapies like Keytruda target express in other cancers). The reason skin cancer gets so much attention is because it's one of the most commonly diagnosed and treated cancers. (Colon is more common, I believe, but it often doesn't get detected. Get your colonoscopies folks).

It has moved fast enough that I've heard from multiple oncologists that the all 5 year survivability numbers are dated because the treatments are newer than the studies.

We've come a LONG way in a very short period in terms of cancer treatment. It still sucks, but not as much as it once did.

> Individualized immune cancer therapy has been touted as the next big thing for half a century. It's nothing new, and with few exceptions, such as skin cancer, has failed to yield much. scientists, for decades, have tired to harness the immune system to attackcancer and it almost never works.

"Almost never" is doing a lot of work. You may be aware that most drugs fail over the course of development and human trials?

Anyway, checkpoint inhibitor therapy is a massive boon to oncology and was only brought into widespread use over the past 15 years.

Personalized mRNA vaccines are in fact, extremely new, and only made possible by recent advances across multiple fields. This comment reveals a total lack of basic understanding on this topic.

And if it doubles after that, I may even beat a passive S&P 500 investment.

I mean, this appears to be validation of mRNA in general, right?

> not really a huge win. It's going to cost taxpayers significancy and may not improve survival much or total life expectancy . The stock is way overextended. It's a long way from anything that can be used on patients, assuming it even works well enough to be a commercial success. History has shown this is seldom the case. I would short it if wasn't so expensive and risky to do so.

Buddy, this is a phase 3 trial. This is about as close as you can get to "anything that can be used on patients" without already being approved.

It is clear that you don't have experience in this area.

Interjecting with a fact. Moderna described the neoantigen immunogenicity prediction algorithm they used to design the vaccines as “a deterministic machine learning (ML) algorithm,” so it may be a small neural network or more traditional algorithm, probably not deep learning.

not if you dropped dead from a heart attack after your therapy. Are you familiar with vioxx ? https://www.npr.org/2007/11/10/5470430/timeline-the-rise-and...