Review 2: "A Simple New Blood Test that Can Catch Cancer Early" by Jimmy Lin

Originally, I chose to listen to this talk because of my interest in biology. I find the subject of disease especially interesting, so when I first saw the headline "A Simple New Blood Test that Can Catch Cancer Early",  I was instantly intrigued.
In this TED talk, Jimmy Lin explains how we are beginning to 'win the war against cancer'. I found the beginning of the talk a little uninteresting. However, after a couple of minutes, Lin shows a picture of a melanoma patient before treatment, after treatment, and after the cancer returns. This was kind of a turning point of the talk, in my opinion. From that point forward, I was interested. Lin then talks about how he, among a large group of scientists, is working to detect cancers earlier. Stage 1 cancers are much easier to cure than other types of cancer, but stage 3 and 4 cancers make up a large portion of diagnoses. Then, Lin talks about how blood tests have been used to detect cancers up to 100 days earlier in some specific patients than when symptoms occur. Although this is definitely interesting and hope-inducing, there are some problems I have with this. First off, in order to detect cancers via blood, we would need to take blood samples quite often, which would be costly and largely ineffective, as the majority of samples would likely be healthy. Secondly, Lin only explains one example of how blood sampling can help detect cancer, meaning that it still may be an unreliable technique - 1 example cannot stand for every type of cancer.
Despite the fact that the talk was very interesting, there was one glaring issue to me. Lin seems to trip up a lot and make a lot of errors while talking. This makes the talk seem a little clunky at points. Along with this, you may need to use subtitles, as Lin has an accent which can be hard to understand at points, which isn't a fault with the talk, but just makes it a little bit harder to comprehend. In my personal opinion, the first talk I watched was less interesting than this one, but the orator was much better. I would recommend this talk for anyone who is interested in biology or diseases in general, but, if you have different interests, you should probably watch a different TED talk.