Re:Silicon Valley Promises AI Will Cure Disease. Drugmaker C...
by nullc on Sunday November 08, 2026 @02:54PM
(#50416515)
On cancer, look at the history of the discovery of BRCA. The data said that vulnerability was extremely heritable. Mary-Claire King's view is that the development of the genetic contribution to cancer was heavily driven by the politics of eugenics-smell.
It's incorrect to say that AI isn't subject to politics, however. That's a choice we can make or not make. I suspect that if Claude existed in the 1980s it would discard the cancer/genetics link as being pro-eugenic racist ideology which has been rejected by the scientific community-- just as many scientists did back then.
I think this is a big reason why we must reject the centralization of AI. Discovery of that one genetic marker has saved countless lives, but it's not something that the scientific community as a whole was going to do then because of eugenics over-correction and similar political factors. Discovery is easily stimmed for the lack of sufficient hetrodox thinking.
It's incorrect to say that AI isn't subject to politics, however. That's a choice we can make or not make. I suspect that if Claude existed in the 1980s it would discard the cancer/genetics link as being pro-eugenic racist ideology which has been rejected by the scientific community-- just as many scientists did back then.
I think this is a big reason why we must reject the centralization of AI. Discovery of that one genetic marker has saved countless lives, but it's not something that the scientific community as a whole was going to do then because of eugenics over-correction and similar political factors. Discovery is easily stimmed for the lack of sufficient hetrodox thinking.