Quote Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker
If you are a programmer and do a crap job, you get fired, and they find someone else. If you are talking about cancer...the business REALLY wants the solution (the business is people, the solution is a cure)....and there is nobody else out there to hire. Who are you going to turn to if science fails? Would you like to try a witch doctor? Go right ahead, people went that route in most societies for thousands of years, so you'll have plenty of company.

But you DO provide an alternative, and it IS a viable alternative. Only one problem: It has been in practice for decades if not millenia, and so far it has failed to provide an answer, either. If some culture was free of cancer, and could attribute it to an herbal remedy, it has been studied (except that none exist). If an organism has been found to be free of cancer (sharks), then THEY have been studied to see whether or not the technique can be applied to humans (nothing so far).

So your suggestion was excellent, but it has been in operation in one form or another for millenia (organized teams searching for herbal remedies are probably only decades old, depending on how you count it). Do you have another option?

As for smoking weed, your example is seriously flawed. You stated yourself that you WILL get hungry, and PROBABLY sleepy. You might also become extremely paranoid, depressed, or happy. The actual results vary enormously for every drug, not just a few. With medical drugs, the actual results for some of them are so subtle that you are really looking for a modest benefit for a modest risk. However, there IS a risk to every drug I have ever heard of (side effects). In fact, every substance is considered to be toxic, it's just a matter of dose. People die every year from drinking water, so even that isn't safe. So the question you must answer for ANY drug you take for any reason (and, indeed, nearly any decision you make), is whether or not the harm is going to be greater than the benefit. Your example fell down because you stated that pot produced a general effect, and you compared that against the specific effects of other drugs. If you compared the specific effects of pot against the specific effects of other drugs, then the two are the same. Of course, you can take this to extremes if you note that the direct application of high speed lead to the brain does not always have the same result.

Shaggy you're misunderstanding us. We're not saying switch away from Science to "witchdoctor", we're saying switch from one Scientific Lab to another.

For example, say we're funding cancer research in a huge lab at Duke Univeristy, 5 years pass, little or no progress at all? Funding will be switched to a new lab, at a different university, maybe the Lab at UNC or even a private company.

All this with a large, 10 to 50 billion dollar reward to be divided among the individuals who made contributions to the cure.

It's the Carrot and the Stick.