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."

Comments

Yeah Right.

[Massacrifice]

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.

Re:Yeah Right.

[radtea]

they merely had this great idea, while looking at the stars after smoking some of the good stuff.

Their entire "theory" boils down to this: "We think that the tumours that develop in cancer patients today take the same form as these simple cellular structures did more than a billion years ago,” he said. ("but we have no particular reason to believe that", he added quietly.)

There is simply no basis for their claim other than "cars are a means of transportation, planes are a means of transportation, so maybe cars are planes after they've landed". I mean, "cancers are loose aggregations of cells, early metazooans were probably loose aggregations of cells, so maybe cancers are early metazooans resurfacing in your body."

Everything we know about the detailed genetics of cancer--which is quite a lot--suggests this is nonsense. If this were the case we'd expect to see far more genetic similarity between cancers than we do, as the hypothesis implies ancient conserved mechanisms for which there is no sign in the genomics of cancer. Cancer is a diverse disease, and while we are making steady progress against it there are fundamental mechanisms that are still poorly understood because they are complicated. The role of various micro-RNAs in particular is only now becoming clear, for example.

The fundamental complexity of the disease is exactly what you would expect if it metazooan life was pulling off a complex and delicate balancing act that can go wrong in multiple ways, and humans had been subject to intense selective pressure for longer lives due to the advantage to a social primate with both representational and operational intelligence of having a few grandparents around in your kin-group. Human cancers are ferociously complex compared to most other species, which is exactly what you would not expect based on this hypothesis that all cancers in all species are pretty much similar at root.

Their "advice" to researchers to focus on what amount to tumour supressor genes would be important if this was 1990.

The genius here is all marketing, not science. They have managed to get an idiotic idea that has zero utility to anyone working on the genetics of cancer quite widely disseminated. That's pretty clever. I only wish the scientists who are in the trenches doing detailed experimental investigations of actual cancer mechanisms were half as good at promoting their thankless and difficult work as these clowns are. Their hypothesis would make a great science fiction story. Unfortunately, that's not the way they've chosen to promote it.

Let the cancer biologists do the cancer biology...

[toppavak]

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.

Natural Selection and Cancer.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Cancer might resemble the kind of cells that eventually made the transition of prokaryotes to eukaryotes. But it is simplistic to say it is governed by just a few genes, so we should be able to handle it. Think about it, if these genes have escaped natural selection for 1 billion years, how hard it is going to be to fight them.

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.

Cancers need to grow blood vessels too

[AC-x]

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

Re:DCA - Dichloroacetate (NOT Dichloroacetic acid)

[Sockatume]

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?

Re:Crappy summary as usual.

[Sockatume]

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".

safe mode?

[circletimessquare]

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

Re:not so easy

[Ponder Stibions]

This is exactly the problem: our genes are like Windows, they just keep adding stuff and patching up the old code, and never start fresh. You never know what you'll break by patching the latest issue...

Re:DCA - Dichloroacetate (NOT Dichloroacetic acid)

[Electricity Likes Me]

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).

Definition of Life and Cancer

[gov_coder]

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'.

Re:wow

[jouassou]

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."

Re:wow

[Samantha Wright]

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.

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

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."