Cancer and AI — Selected Events
Cancer and AI
there is nothing new under the sun
2600 BCE
Egypt — Edwin Smith papyrus
“One having a wound in his throat, piercing through to his gullet… an ailment with which I will contend.”
- “An ailment which I will treat” — curable
- “An ailment with which I will contend” — potentially curable
- “An ailment which will not be treated” — incurable
400 BCE
Greece — Hippocrates names things — Karkinos
~0 CE
China — First known epidemiological observation — hot alcohol and throat cancer
1200 CE
“Medicine” enters the English language
1538
Paracelsus - Sola dosis facit venenum.
1690
John Casaubon's diary
“At dinner I was almost choaked by swallowing a bit of a roasted Sd of mutton which as I thought stuck in the passage about the mouth of the stomach. But it suffered noething to goe downe and the stomach threw all up… on a sudden I grew lean as a skeleton and at some tymes very faint and feeble… my meate doeth noe gt. good and I am in a kind of atrophie… It is a sine of gt weakenes certainly and of insoaed decay.”
1842
Ada Lovelace writes the first computer program
1882
Halsted — the radical mastectomy
Trigger warning.
1882
Halsted — the radical mastectomy
1886
Synthesis of mustard gas
1895
Discovery of X-rays
- 1896: X-rays used to treat cancers.
- 1899: Sweden reports the first successful cures of skin carcinomas with X-rays.
1907
Synthesis of arsphenamine (Salvarsan)
- The first drug called a chemotherapy: chemicals that specifically target disease-causing organisms.
- Salvarsan was the standard of care for treating syphilis until penicillin was invented.
1917
Use of mustard gas in warfare
1942
Patient JD
Goodman, Gilman, and Lindskog secretly treat a patient with non-Hodgkin lymphoma using nitrogen mustard at Yale — the first modern chemotherapy.
1949
First FDA-approved cancer drug — HN2 (Mustargen)
1956
Methotrexate cures choriocarcinoma without surgery or radiation
1956
"AI" first defined
- How to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves.— John McCarthy. 1956.
- AI is a collective name for problems which we do not yet know how to solve properly by computer.— Bertram Raphael, via Donald Michie. 1971.
- AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet.— Larry Tesler, via Douglas Hofstadter. 1979.
1966
ELIZA — the first "chatterbot"
1973
Invention of the PET scanner - high dimensional data
XR (2D) → CT (3D) → PET (4D)
1977
Apple II launch
1988
Me!
1990
The Human Genome Project starts
1996
Deep Blue beats Kasparov in game 1
Kasparov takes the match 4–2; Deep Blue wins the 1997 rematch.
1997
First monoclonal antibody for cancer — rituximab (anti-CD20)
2001
Imatinib approved — BCR-ABL targeted therapy — CML becomes a chronic disease.
2003
Human Genome completed
2009
Fei-Fei Lee publishes ImageNet - 14 million annotated images
2018
First FDA-approved autonomous AI system — IDx-DR — diabetic retinopathy detection
2022
Release of ChatGPT
How do LLMs work?
| Mary | had | a | little | lamb | 88.59% |
| Lamb | 0.74% | ||||
| lamp | 0.65% | ||||
| \n | 0.40% | ||||
| skirt | 0.21% | ||||
How do LLMs work?
| Mozart | had | a | little | sister | 45.63% |
| bit | 4.78% | ||||
| star | 4.78% | ||||
| pet | 3.32% | ||||
| red | 1.58% | ||||
References
- Adams, F. (trans.) The Genuine Works of Hippocrates. (Sydenham Society, 1849).
- Abràmoff, M. D., Lavin, P. T., Birch, M., Shah, N. & Folk, J. C. Pivotal trial of an autonomous AI-based diagnostic system for detection of diabetic retinopathy in primary care offices. npj Digital Medicine 1:39 (2018). FDA De Novo DEN180001, April 11, 2018.
- Bertheim, A. Über das p-Aminophenylarsinsaure und Verwandtes. Berichte der deutschen chemischen Gesellschaft 40, 3076–3082 (1907) — synthesis of compound 606.
- Breasted, J. H. The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus. (University of Chicago Press, 1930).
- Deng, J., Dong, W., Socher, R., Li, L.-J., Li, K. & Fei-Fei, L. ImageNet: A large-scale hierarchical image database. CVPR 248–255 (2009).
- Druker, B. J. et al. Efficacy and safety of a specific inhibitor of the BCR-ABL tyrosine kinase in chronic myeloid leukemia. NEJM 344, 1031–1037 (2001).
- Ehrlich, P. & Hata, S. Die experimentelle Chemotherapie der Spirillosen. (Springer, 1910) — therapeutic application.
- Farber, S., Diamond, L. K., Mercer, R. D., Sylvester, R. F. & Wolff, J. A. Temporary remissions in acute leukemia in children produced by folic acid antagonist, 4-aminopteroyl-glutamic acid (aminopterin). NEJM 238, 787–793 (1948) — aminopterin, the precursor to methotrexate.
- Gilman, A. & Philips, F. S. The biological actions and therapeutic applications of the B-chloroethyl amines and sulfides. Science 103, 409–436 (1946).
- Goodman, L. S., Wintrobe, M. M., Dameshek, W., Goodman, M. J., Gilman, A. & McLennan, M. T. Nitrogen mustard therapy: use of methyl-bis(beta-chloroethyl)amine hydrochloride and tris(beta-chloroethyl)amine hydrochloride for Hodgkin’s disease, lymphosarcoma, leukemia, and certain allied and miscellaneous disorders. JAMA 132, 126–132 (1946).
- Hsu, F.-H. Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer that Defeated the World Chess Champion. (Princeton University Press, 2002).
- International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium. Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome. Nature 431, 931–945 (2004).
- Li, M. C., Hertz, R. & Spencer, D. B. Effect of methotrexate therapy upon choriocarcinoma and chorioadenoma. Proc Soc Exp Biol Med 93, 361–366 (1956).
- Maloney, D. G. et al. IDEC-C2B8 (Rituximab) anti-CD20 monoclonal antibody therapy in patients with relapsed low-grade non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Blood 90, 2188–2195 (1997).
- McCarthy, J., Minsky, M. L., Rochester, N. & Shannon, C. E. A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence (August 31, 1955); workshop held summer 1956.
- Meyer, V. Über Thiodiglykolverbindungen. Berichte der deutschen chemischen Gesellschaft 19, 3259–3266 (1886).
- Mukherjee, S. The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. (Scribner, 2010).
- OpenAI. Introducing ChatGPT. https://openai.com/index/chatgpt/ (30 November 2022).
- Paracelsus. Septem Defensiones (1538). The Latin tag sola dosis facit venenum is a later paraphrase of his German: “Alle Ding sind Gift… allein die Dosis macht, dass ein Ding kein Gift ist.”
- Röntgen, W. C. Über eine neue Art von Strahlen (Vorläufige Mittheilung). Sitzungsberichte der Würzburger Physik.-medic. Gesellschaft 9, 132–141 (1895).
- Russakovsky, O. et al. ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge. IJCV 115, 211–252 (2015).
- Stenbeck, T. Ein Fall von Hautkrebs geheilt durch Röntgenbestrahlung. Mitteilungen aus den Grenzgebieten der Medizin und Chirurgie 6, 347–349 (1900) — reporting the 1899 Stockholm cure.
- Ter-Pogossian, M. M., Phelps, M. E., Hoffman, E. J. & Mullani, N. A. A positron-emission transaxial tomograph for nuclear imaging (PETT). Radiology 114, 89–98 (1975) — PETT prototype operational 1973–74.
- Weizenbaum, J. ELIZA — a computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine. Communications of the ACM 9, 36–45 (1966).