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Scientists Unlock Reasons Cancer Spreads
* * Beatles-Beatles writes "Instead of a cell just breaking off from a tumor and traveling through the bloodstream to another organ where it forms a secondary tumour, or metastasis, researchers in the United States have shown that the cancer sends out envoys to prepare the new site."
Slashdot: Spam for Readers. Page Rank for * * Beatles-Beatles.
I've always thought the wiser thing would be for a President to proclaim that we shall cure cancer within the next decade. Rather than the tired old Moo... er, Mars thing.
Assuming validity to this story, it seems such a thing might be possible.
A nice side benefit is that the government money involved goes less into the military-industrial complex, and more into medical research. Yes, I know that there are still military applications to any such research... nevertheless it would be nice if the government's research money was targeted directly and explicitly at a benefit to humanity. A cure for cancer falls in that category.
From the rip of a http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169603 &cid=14134565>rip:
I'm recycling a comment from another AC in another Scuttlemonkey/**Beatles-Beatles post. This guy's getting worse than Roland Picklepail:
Am I the only person who has noticed the numerous stories that get posted by *--Beatles-Beatles? Am I also the only person who has noticed that the link used in is name is a constantly changing URL (depending on the story) with pointers to various scammy sites? Is it not obvious what he's doing? He's using the awesome PageRank of slashdot do promote his sites based on searches that have the word Beatles in them.
It's a small price to pay for free advertising. Find a story, summarize it in 5 minutes, post to slashdot, and get a pagerank boost that advertisers would pay hundreds (or maybe thousands) for. (Text links on high-ranking sites is big business - just ask oreilly).
Slashdot should at least put a ref=nofollow in the links to submitters (or better yet, only link the submitter's name to his/her user page).
In closing, a quick bit of WHOIS shows that all the sites linked by **B-B are registered to Carl Fogle. Carl, cut this crap out.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Cancer is a condition of abnormal cell division and growth, not some anaerobic chemical reaction. The cancerous cells have the same metabolic requirement for OXYGEN that normal cells do. OK, sure, they could rely on glycolysis and not use blood oxygen, but rapidly dividing cells use more energy than glycolysis can reasonably provide.
Take your "omg the evil drug companies invented disease so they could gouge us" conspiriacy theories and shove them where the sun don't shine.
Sick of WoW? Try the thinking man's MMORPG: EVE Online
Have you ever hear of the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Center? A ton of government money has been going into cancer research for decades. A problem is that cancer is not a single entity, it is hundreds of different diseases. Tremendous progress has been made, but it is unlikely we will ever make any single discovery that can be called "the cure for cancer".
Which "thing" are you referring to? The ability of bone marrow cells to bind to fibronectin? That's fairly essential, seeing that's how cells attach to connective tissue. Or maybe the ability of fibronectin to be soluble in the blood stream? Also fairly vital for things like blood clotting etc... (not to speak of the numerous roles fibronectin has in development)
Lots of things in biological systems are not built "logically". There are some fairly absurd mechanisms that exist merely because they have evolved from other systems that were originally doing something else, and because they "work", but they are not necessarily the simplest or best solution, even though they do usually find a "local maximum"... Sometimes they can leave the system open to attacks.
As for selection pressure *against* this functionality, I would suspect there is very little (practically none). Why?
Think about the meaning of selection pressure. It applies almost primarily to your ability to have offspring, and to how far you can support your offspring to procreate themselves. Given that people generally die of cancer later in life, and given that for the vast majority of mammal evolution this would occur at a point far exceeding the average life expectancy (leave alone the time where parents have influence on their children), I don't think there is any negative selection pressure.
Mars is a single object, it's big, we know where it is, what rules it follows and how to hit it.
It makes a difference.
KFG
Similarly, having more people doing research also doesn't really speed things up. Just an empirical observation based on experience.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, I posted that I rather expect the cure for cancer, assuming there actually is one, will come from some entirely unexpected corner disconected from the massive cancer research projects.
Science is not an assembly line.
KFG
We are fighting a war: a war on cancer
And we are losing.
--
I beg to differ you little shit. I have leukemia, and 20 years ago the doctor would have told me "make youself comfortable, you have X years/months to live". 10 years ago they would ahve hit me up with a powerful chemo and then done a bone marrow transplant, a risky procedure at best. My odd of surviving that would not have been optimal though it would be possible. Now, with the release of a drug called gleevec, my prognosis is good. Once I adapt to the side effect (which are tough, but not as bad as traditional chemo), this pill could actually put me into remission. So you are absolutely dead wrong. Money for cancer research it working, and it is saving my life (even though I am now only 22).
xao
http://TheHillforum.hopto.org
And this begs the question: what is the evolutionnary benefit of cancer?
Why does it have to be a benefit, why can't evolution sometimes make a bad turn, am I alone in thinking that not every mutation has to be a good one.
PS. I still prefer the old meaning of "Begging the question"
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
I'm surprised that so many researchers still view cancer as a sentient malicious being living within a biological system.
Did anyone explicity or implicitly say it is?
We have cured many types of cancer. When someone finds out that they have cancer, the first question is no longer "How long have I got?", it is now "Is it curable?".
Why does it have to be a benefit, why can't evolution sometimes make a bad turn, am I alone in thinking that not every mutation has to be a good one.
If it was one single mutation, that had no benefits except it causes cancer... in each generation, part of the bearers of the mutation would die before they had bred, and each generation the percentage of people(*) having the mutation would go down. It's just extremely unlikely that such a mutation would spread to affect the whole of humanity.
What's much more likely is that there are a number of different causes, some of them not genetic at all, some part of a bunch of mutations that have benefits as well as causing cancer.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.