It is just possible that some folks there have made a spiffier adenovirus cancer hack.  One should think so, if it’s getting ready to go to human trials, as Breitbart’s article suggests.  This is great news that will hopefully ease the general unpleasantness of the previous stem-cell fakery.

If there should be nationalism and national competition/pride, etcetera, then surely one of the ways it should happen is nations both cooperating and competing to see who can bring the greatest happiness to the human race.

Now, here’s the interesting bit:  if said adenovirus can be made to function as a broad-specrtum curative… then we may be in a position to start seeing a really huge jump in human lifespan.

Yes, skippy, thank you for that rousing chorus of “duh’s…”

No, beyond the obvious diminution of folks kicking off from cancer.  Remember, it wasn’t all that long ago that some bright folks figured out that aging can be described as Nature’s Very Clumsy Cancer Defense.  Senescence or tumors, take your pick.  Nobody that I know of is particularly keen to drop forty years off their perceived age, and thereby greatly extend their possible lifespan, if it comes with the price tag of being so cancer-riddled that you wind up kicking off from tumors within the year.

But in theory, if something like this, and its 3rd-and-4th-gen descendents were put into your yoghurt and breakfast cereal the way riboflavin is now… then all those people whose horizons have shrunk into a half-hour’s agonizingly painful and clumsy trip across the living room with a walker could be restored to full participation in society again.

If you want a we did that to be proud of… that’d be a hum-dinger of an excuse to strut.

And in the mean time, while we’re waiting, FuturePundit says “eat fish.”  Wow.