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Cancer Resembles Life 1 Billion Years Ago
An anonymous reader writes "What is cancer? It's not an invader; it's spawned from our own bodies. And it bears striking resemblance to early multicellular life from 1 billion years ago. This has led astrobiologists and cosmologists Paul Davies and Charlie Lineweaver to suggest that cancer is driven by primitive genes that govern cellular cooperation (abstract), and which kick in when our more recently evolved genes that keep them in check break down. So, far from being rogue cells that mutate out of control, cancers are actually cells that revert to a more ancient level of programming, like booting in Safe Mode. The good news is this means cancers have only finite variation. Once we figure out the ancient genes, we'll know how it works. It's unlikely to evolve any new defense mechanisms, meaning curing cancer might be not quite as mammoth a task as commonly thought."
It's unlikely to evolve any new defense mechanisms, meaning curing cancer might be not quite as mammoth a task as commonly thought.
nanos gigantium humeris insidentes
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Do you really think you'll still be in a cancer-prone human body for most of the span until the 400th birthday you hope for. I'm not as optimistic about the Singularity as Ray Kurzweil and similar futurists (though Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near is thought-provoking), but surely sometime within the next century or so we will have moved beyond biology. So, you only need miracle cures that get you that far.
Astrobiologists doing cancer "research"? Half of the submission is written as if they had cancer already nailed down, while the rest of it implies that they merely had this great idea, while looking at the stars after smoking some of the good stuff. If there are no experiments, hard results, conclusive evidence, well pfew, it's not news that matter. I make up a dozen theories like this per day.
-- Home is where you eat your heart out.
booting in Safe Mode.
Is it possible for you people to wipe your butts without using some half-assed, fallacious computer analogy? Is this all the bazaar has done for you?
The summary look like curing cancer is a matter of very simple solution. I doubt this.
Even if cancer behavior rely on primitive gene programming. There where billion years of incremental evolution build and re-factored over that, I firmly doubt it is a matter of turning on/off or stripping out some cytochrome block cancerous cells from forming/growing.
Léa Gris
The good news is this means cancers have only finite variation. Once we figure out the ancient genes, we'll know how it works. It's unlikely to evolve any new defense mechanisms, meaning curing cancer might be not quite as mammoth a task as commonly thought.
We've already figured out how most cancer works. At a gross, generalized level you have oncogenes (genes responsible for driving growth) and tumor suppressor genes (genes responsible for regulating growth) when interrelated genes of both varieties break in a cell, it becomes a cancer. A detailed molecular understanding of how some cancers work have led to effective treatments (see: Imatinib, Tamoxifen and Raloxifene) but that's hardly been successfully translated to other cancers where the broken parts aren't as easily modulated. In fact, Raloxifene was developed specifically because Tamoxifen which inhibits an oncogene in breast tissue activated the same oncogene in uterine tissue. What 10 years of the human genome have taught us is that not all diseases are direct or simple breaks in genetic code and that not all diseases with known, simple breaks in the genetic code are as easily treatable as we might like.
Basically natural selection will be able to filter out any gene that affects the reproductive ability. Given the length of time, even extraordinarily minute differences will make a difference and eventually deleterious genes will be filtered out. But if some gene trades improved fitness at the reproductive stage for some serious cost to life at a later stage, that gene will never be filtered out. The extreme example is the trout that had traded it so much that it dies immediately after spawning. Its entire metabolism is structured to improve fitness before spawning to very serious inability to live after spawning.
Even if these guys were right, and with modern science you are able to find that one gene whose loss of function causes cancer, and they are able to fix it, all it means is you will not die of cancer, but will die of other geriatric diseases. Some of them are painful, some of them are embarrassing. But the most heart wrenching ones are those that trap a dead brain in a functioning body or a functioning brain in a dying body.
I wish science would concentrate on improving the quality of life when alive and allow both the body and the brain to die together painlessly.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It's a nice theory, but cancers aren't completely self sufficient. They need to form blood vessels to grow any larger than a pin head and early sponge-like organisms certainly didn't have those.
http://www.cancerhelp.org.uk/about-cancer/what-is-cancer/grow/how-a-cancer-gets-its-blood-supply
That web scam's putative mechanism for DCA activity is that cancer cells have completely inactive mitochondria? Are you fucking kidding me? Do you even know what a mitochondrion does?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
The arrogance is not present in the original source: they present their hypothesis, outline how it can be tested, and explain its potential impact on cancer research. The hyperbole and hubris comes from the author of the summary and the article, not the scientists. They only write of "new reasons for optimism".
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
There is almost no funding for this drug study due to it being un-patentable despite quite encouraging results, and reasonably acceptable and reversible side-effects.
Universities do all kinds of unpatentable research. Whereas a company looks to patent a product to make money, universities look to release research in order to earn prestige, which means more money.
(As a side note, companies can make quite a profit off of prestige as well. Prestige buys a company trust of a brand name. Brand name recognition goes a long way towards profit for a company)
So, in conclusion, your theory is full of shit.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
given that this article postulates that cancer cells have apparently been the default mode of cellular division for perhaps billions of years, and personal computers have only been around for 30 years, it would be more appropriate to say you sometimes need to boot your computer into cancer mode. that's a more appropriate analogy
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
surely sometime within the next century or so we will have moved beyond biology
Whaaaa? Where did you get that idea? Also, do you really think that even if you copied your consciousness to a machine that it would still be you? It will be a copy, and "you" will die anyway. I saw someone once mention the idea of replacing neurons one at a time with digital equivalents.. that might work to retain your consciousness while moving away from biology, but it would be almost impossible to do..
which is totally what she said
Also chemo and radiation work extremely well for certain types of cancer, and work *precisely* because they affect cancerous cells far more readily then ordinary body cells (specifically: they induce damage in cells engaged in replication in the process of duplicating their DNA - cancer is doing this all the time, whereas most of your body is not replicating at any given time. It's why your hair falls out - the cells are engaged in aggressive replication constantly, and so are most affected).
Life: the decision of approximately 4 billion cells to be 'you' for a while.
Cancer: When some of the 4 billion cells decide to form a 'tea party'.
Rob Enderle's excellent new book: Everything I needed to know about Computer Science I learned in Marketing School
One day this talk of the Singularity and downloading our minds into machines will be viewed the way we currently view alchemy and orgone healing boxes.
Futurists sell books. Warning: actual future may vary.
Especially since curing cancer would allow Telomerase treatments to increase our lifespan artificially. :
From wikipedia
"The enzyme telomerase allows for replacement of short bits of DNA known as telomeres, which are otherwise shortened when a cell divides via mitosis. "In normal circumstances, without the presence of telomerase, if a cell divides recursively, at some point all the progeny will reach their Hayflick limit.[13] With the presence of telomerase, each dividing cell can replace the lost bit of DNA, and any single cell can then divide unbounded. While this unbounded growth property has excited many researchers, caution is warranted in exploiting this property, as exactly this same unbounded growth is a crucial step in enabling cancerous growth."
The life as a whole it doesn't perform a valuable function, but the individual cells that turn cancerous might have been about to die from some other cause when they revert. And that makes sense, cancer is made more likely by genetic damage, perhaps the cells are becoming cancerous when there is some piece or another of genetic code that is damaged beyond repair so the cell reverts to a simpler set of instructions that perform a similar role. A set which, unfortunately, lacks such handy things as communications channels and programmed cell death.
Kind of like if Windows can't find a file that it needs to boot normally, so it boots into safe mode so you can fix the problem. Except, this safe mode doesn't have a display driver, keyboard support, or Ethernet support... and it causes the computer to reproduce out of control. So the analogy isn't perfect, but no one ever said analogies had to be.
Yes, we might. After all, cancer has already evolved into species of it's own...
Windows isn't a virus, it's a cancer.
rewriting history since 2109
Are you hoping to turn into some kind of Leonard Betts?
I'm thinking more along the lines of Lazarus Long.
While we are technically a copy of our former selves it doesn't feel that way. If you could - without turning off the brain - take out each part, piece by piece and replace it with something so convincing that the brain accepted it as part of itself then you would never realise that you had become a robot.
However if you built a robot with all your memories, emotions, thoughts and personality then no matter how accurate it was there is no way to transfer the you-ness of you - the real you, the soul or whatever - into the machine. It may think, feel and act exactly like you but there would be no way to experience it. If you were gradually transformed then the "you" experiencing it would never stop experiencing. By the time you are totally changed it would no longer be the original you, but only in the same way that your current body isn't the original you - from your point of view it would still be you.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
The DCA Site website was put up by laymen to pool together scarce information due to the lack of knowledge available at the time what research was available from corporate or academic sources.
You'll find similar inaccuracies in exact terminology or phrasing in the laymen comments on The DCA Site as you can find in laymen comments in Slashdot. I doubt that the intent was to convey that the mitochondria was completely disabled, only that an important function of the mitochondria, the ability to signal time for cell death, was disabled in cancer cells. Also, the poster was not conveying an opinion, he is citing a paper so that you can look into it further.
http://www.cell.com/cancer-cell/abstract/S1535-6108(06)00372-2
Here's an excerpt from WIki:
"Cancer cells generally use glycolysis rather than respiration (oxidative phosphorylation) for energy (the Warburg effect), as a result of hypoxia that exists in tumors and damaged mitochondria.[13] Usually dangerously damaged cells kill themselves via apoptosis, a mechanism of self-destruction that involves mitochondria, but this mechanism fails in cancer cells.
A phase one study published in January 2007 by researchers at the University of Alberta, who had tested DCA on cancer cells grown in mice, found that DCA restored mitochondrial function, thus restoring apoptosis, killing cancer cells and shrinking the tumors.[14]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichloroacetic_acid
= 9J =
if it were "simple", random chance should have stumbled across it over time, and THAT would spread through the population because it confers a survival advantage for your family/tribe
Not really. Cancer rarely occurs early in life. For most of human history, you would have died well before cancer had a chance to finish you off. Even now it mostly occurs late enough in life that it doesn't affect reproduction. Ergo, the evolutionary advantage would be weak-to-non-existent, meaning the mutations might have no better odds of spreading than what would be expected from pure chance.
I'm quite happy with that, I'm talking about my apparently unbroken stream of consciousness, not the body that results in that consciousness. Creating a copy and destroying the current stream may not give any noticeable difference to outsiders, but it sure as hell would be annoying for the current me, if I were still around to be annoyed about it.
which is totally what she said
It's called the duplicates paradox or sometimes the transporter paradox. If you get duplicated and then the original is destroyed, there isn't a continuity of consciousness. You seem to have completely missed this in order to make your point about biological renewal.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
What you point out is a challenge of logic for human cognition but it doesn't negate the fact that we are humans and this is the way our cognition works.
I think it's time for a car analogy. If you replace parts of your car over the years, one by one, most of us would insist it's still the same car. If you go out tomorrow and buy another car of the same year, model, colour, etc, is it the same car? Most of us would say not. There is something within us that reacts this way to replacement. You might not like it but it's a fact that humans think this way.
If you prefer a computer analogy, essentially everything that makes your computer unique, as far as is easily identifiable, rests on the hard drive. If you buy an identical computer and copy the information on the hard drive from your old one, has the computer been replaced or not? I think you'd try to stretch this, perhaps for didactic purpose, to get us to say it has not but I also think that any human would say that it has been.
To me, far more interesting is the case of copying that destroys the original. Think of the transporter in Star Trek. The original disappears from the pad and the information contained is used to recreate the subject remotely from other matter. Essentially, every atom of the individual has been replaced but we think of it as the same person. If the original was not destroyed in the copying process, though, I guarantee that we would think of the one standing on the planet as a copy.
It's all about context, isn't it? We may pride ourselves on being logical but, for certain things, logic does not drive our perception. It would be better to realise this and remain vigilant for its operation than to rail against it and cry, "I would it were not so."
It never ceases to amaze me how many people one can readily find who will just mentally glom onto a conspiracy theory and resolutely hold to that notion as though it were an incontrovertible fact, simultaneously ignoring not only the reasonable evidence that might well suggest that the perspective is wrong, and also ignoring the fact that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support the notion outside of the contrived ideas that build up the notion in the first place, but also choosing to completely disregard the very real factors in the world that are likely to have prevented such a conspiracy from developing in the first place.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
But the problem is the Matrix "How do machines know what chicken tastes like?" bit, in that machines don't do nuances and it is the nuances that make us who we are.
I mean I'm sure if we followed you around for a year filming and then threw a couple of thousand IBM programmers on it they could make a pretty damned perfect simulation of you running on Blue Gene. It would have your mannerisms, have your laugh, to those interacting with it, even those that knew you, it would probably be pretty lifelike and "real". But we tech guys would know that underneath the glossy exterior you would have path finding subroutines and an AI not much different than a chess computer, yet you don't think that way, do you?
While I wouldn't mind having some of these old limbs replaced with cybernetics in the future, the problem with replacing bits of the brain is at what point does it cease to be you and just becomes a simulation. We organics are illogical gut reacting seat of our pants kinds of creatures and machines just don't do that well, and I don't see shrinking the diodes to nanoscale changing that At what point does it go from you laughing because you thought something was funny to because the programs say that would be your typical response?
As for TFA as someone who has lost relatives to cancer and seen first hand what it can do to the human body anything we learn that helps us to place cancer alongside polio is in the history books is great in my book. Hell there are so many different ways to kill us from car wrecks to heart attacks I'm sure losing one won't be a big deal and that one is pure nasty. Not to mention with all the chemicals now in our systems (last I read even newborns test positive for plastics in the blood) cancers seem to be on the rise, so anything that can take cancer out of the equation is a big win in my book.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.