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."

Comments

You have got to be kidding me

[ndansmith]

Slashdot: Spam for Readers. Page Rank for * * Beatles-Beatles.

Re:You have got to be kidding me

[IamTheRealMike]

It's not particularly obvious, but * * Beatles Beatles keeps submitting (legitimate) stories where his username links to random websites that apparently have nothing to do with him or the story. The domains in question are pretty clearly designed to spam Google by leveraging the enormous PageRank that Slashdot has.

The domains are all registered to the same guy, Carl Fogle, who like all search engine spammers is a premier-league asshole who was apparently never taught that enlightened self interest is supposed to make the world a better place for everybody, not be an excuse for screwing over friends and neighbours who rely on a shared resource.

Re:You have got to be kidding me

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Can someone link to/explain the Beatles-Beatles ref. please?

Beatles-Beatles is the solid, undeniable, irrefutable proof that the Slashdot editor system is broken. While great submissions are tossed daily, Beatles-Beatles is allowed to continue to abuse his articles on Slashdot to increase his Google PageRank.

Essentially Slashdot is actively promoting a spammer, at the expense of better articles.

Several possibilities come to mind. One; the Slashdot Editors have been bribed by said spammer. Two; the Slashdot editors are not bothering to proof read any articles. Three; The slashdot editors have simply stopped reading the article comments, where Beatles-Beatles has been critisised on numerous occassions. Four; The Slashdot Random Story Submission Selection System is broken. The reader can decide which of these is more likely.

In the era of Digg.com, I think the Slashdot editors should be doing more to justify the editor system. As it happens, Slashdot is becoming the prime example of why the editor system is inferior. I would like this to change, but the Slashdot Eds really just don't seem to care about the site anymore.

Still the comments are good.

Re:You have got to be kidding me

[Breakfast Pants]

How about if the people who booked guests for the shows had a queue of possible guests sorted by ascii value so guests starting with "* *...." got picked the most often? I would blame the bookers for the show for a flawed system (*hint* *hint*).

Now if we could just unlock the secrets behind...

[mattjb0010]

...the spread of **Beatles articles.

w00t!

[digismack]

Yes! One step closer to finding the cure for cancer. /me lights another Marlboro...

Ordinary Bone Marrow Cells vs Stem Cells

[Quirk]

The article mentioned ordinary bone marrow cells, but recent reports have cited... "Bone marrow stem cells, for example, are the most primitive cells in the marrow. From them all the various types of blood cells are descended. Bone marrow stem-cell transfusions (or transplants) were originally given to replace various types of blood cells."

"Stem cells from bone marrow can also, quite remarkably, give rise to non-marrow cells"

Do bone marrow cells exhibit pluripotent characteristics that lend them to the use metastasis puts them to?

Re:Ordinary Bone Marrow Cells vs Stem Cells

[paulsgre]

Metastasis is merely the movement of a tumor colony to another part of the body. Bone marrow cells are no more useful as a metastasic cell than as any other cell type, because cancer reverts whatever tissue it initially attacks back to a pluripotent state. What cancer cells DO is cause differentiated cells to become pluripotent. Every cell has the same DNA inside it, but most of the DNA is suppressed after development and only the specialized genes for that cell are expressed. Cancer arises when DNA suppression and replication machinery is hijacked and the cell becomes chaotically embryonic in nature, proliferating not only through wild replication but by abusing the cell's ability to produce hormones and other cell to cell signalling molecules. Carcinogens, oncogenes, and onco-viruses all cause cancer by essentially turning on a cell's replication machinery and reverting the cells back to pluripotent and proliferative states, regardless of the state of differentiation that they were previously in. If anything, my guess would be that bone-marrow cells are more resistant to cancerous agents, because they spend extended periods of time in a pluripotent state without dividing out of control, and probably have expression and activation feedback systems that keep them in check that other cells don't necessarily express.

Somebody think of the children!

[xtracto]

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.

Re:An even more interesting cancer finding.

[Stephen H-B]

What the fuck have you been smoking?

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.

The language of cells

[SilverspurG]

I'm surprised that so many researchers still view cancer as a sentient malicious being living within a biological system.

Cells have a language that they use to communicate. They communicate with the cells in the other tissues around them. They communicate with the blood cells as they pass by. They communicate with the various cells of the immune system. This communication is constant. Every cell is constantly emitting and absorbing a matrix of cytokines, lymphokines, and other chemokines. It is from the interpretation of all of these different levels that a cell adapts and responds to its environment.

Cancerous cells are simply responding to their environment. In many ways a cancerous cell is malfunctioning. In many ways the set of chemokines which it emits acknowledges that it's malfunctioning. In a body with a healthy immune system the immune response is properly recruited and the cancerous cells are put out of their misery. This is why babies can grow so quickly with so little chance for deformity. The cells are communicating properly and the body ensures that any malfunctioning cells are removed.

In a cancer, when a cell begins malfunctioning, the immune system is not notified of the problem. The surrounding cells, when exposed to the proper levels of the signaling molecules, may be programmed to imitate the same behavior. I believe that this is part of a larger process that's supposed to work to increase the intensity of the signal and attract the immune system. If the immune system is not properly recruited, though, then the originating cells divide and become more and more degenerate and the increased level, intensity, and garbled nature of the signal aggravates even more cells in the area. When sufficiently aggravated without any response to attenuate the signals from the malfunctioning cells then more and more proper cells will begin to show signs of chemical stress and become cancerous, necrotic, or apoptotic.

In some cases the original cancerous cell may not be technically malfunctioning. That cell may be responding appropriately to surrounding tissue which has become numb and nonfunctional. This can be seen in bone cancers where the osteoblast count is at extreme low levels. The remaining osteoblasts are tired, overworked, stressed, and more than a little frightened by the absence of their comrades. Those cells begin exhibiting chemical signs of that stress meant to recruit the repropagation of other osteoblasts. If the situation isn't remedied, however, it's very easy to think that the osteoblast is evilly trying to metastasize. In tissues of high cell censity (kidney, pancreas, stomach, intestine, brain) it's most likely that the cancer is a result of a malfunctioning immune system. In a tissue of low cell density (bone) it's most likely that the cancer is a result of a deficiency in the tissue itself--maybe a logical sign of natural aging.

At any given point in time any one of us has a number of cancerous cells in our body. They're not sentiently floating around looking for tissue to victimize--they're doing what they've been programmed to do: survive.

The real question has always been: Why isn't the immune system responding appropriately? In most cancers the immune system is responding improperly or flat-out ignoring the problem. The studies of immunologists on the pathways of intercell signaling is very important research but sorely underfunded because research and study rarely leads to quick quarterly profit. There are easily hundreds of different intercell signaling molecules all tailored for their own specific message. The field is so complex that it's very difficult to quantify progress in the eyes of the business managers who have no conceptual understanding of the task or the technology.