Before cancer kills, it cheats
news.harvard.edu
Before cancer kills, it cheats
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Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats
#2Professor at a med school here.
Regardless of whether you think the specifics presented in this article (e.g., NSAIDS-esophageal cancer) are right, it’s great to see this kind of philosophical approach to biomedical research. We need more people like this professor.
That she started with a plant and that made her think about humans was a great insight. She rightly recognizes the key role of cell autonomous vs. cell non-autonomous processes in how multicellular organisms work.
That she is a woman and someone not at an Ivy League school is also very refreshing to see getting publicized by Harvard. There are so many great scientists aground the world doing great stuff. Let’s keep finding them and reporting on them!
Please media, more of these types of stories and less clickbait please! I loved this article. My faith in humanity was restored just a touch here.
Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats
#3A future where cancer is controlled but not cured is just as good and might be easier to achieve. I hope science gets there before I get cancer which is inevitable, unless I die from a heart attack.
Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats
#4A future where cancer is controlled but not cured is just as good and might be easier to achieve. I hope science gets there before I get cancer which is inevitable, unless I die from a heart attack.
Methinks future lies in between. Many people say that we all have cancer, at different scales and different reach. So just avoiding massive tumors and metastasis is probable the goal.
Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats
#5Professor at a med school here. Regardless of whether you think the specifics presented in this article (e.g., NSAIDS-esophageal cancer) are right, it’s great to see this kind of philosophical approach to biomedical research. We need more people like this professor. That she started with a plant and that made her think about humans was a great insight. She rightly recognizes the key role of cell autonomous vs. cell n…
The irony is, we are very likely to have been baited here. Playing devils advocate:
* Started with a plant -> thought about humans. Great insight or actively encouraged progression of research? Research that isn't about humans and their immediate crisis' is less valuable so receives less funding, to try and relate your research to humans is to pursue a primary incentive. Sounds a bit like the ever more fictional founding stories.
* Rightly recognising cell autonomous vs non-autonomous processes. I'm not a biologist - but this sounds like something every leading biologist should recognise?
* She is a woman. Presumably she didn't do this research alone, so there is an iceberg of people we aren't seeing. Looking back I don't think the Harvard Gazette is starved for things to write about, so there may in fact be selection bias towards women being shown over men - its politically favourable at the moment.
* Not from an Ivy-League school being publicised by Harvard. Harvard slaps its name next to other people's research, promoting the superiority of its brand in giving handouts to sub-par institutions.
I don't know how to play devils advocate on the philosophical approach; I'm biased - glad to see research in the upper echelons of biological research which considers the stoic approach.
Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats
#6Here are some ideas:
Look at the functional call stack. Its a slice of the linear address space that’s actively being used and it is strikingly similar to the promoter regions of the genome. Like some pathogens, hackers randomly try to hit that sweet spot that will jump to the special program.
Operating systems are like simple biological organisms that evolve in response to various influences (cybersecurity it seems these days). My favorite is OpenBSD, they invent the cybersecurity. They were one of the first to implement address randomization for kernel and library loading. This is actually strikingly similar to what goes on with the genome with retrotransposons during early embryology stages.
People really like to repeatmask (aka SINE/introns) genomes because it makes BLAST go faster. Ironically, arithmetic/statistical compression algorithms work really well with repeats (I don’t think this compressed state can be examined, but compression algorithms are seriously under appreciated).
Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats
#7A future where cancer is controlled but not cured is just as good and might be easier to achieve. I hope science gets there before I get cancer which is inevitable, unless I die from a heart attack.
Agreed. My wife is going through this now, and the primary issue is the uncertainty around it all. Nobody can tell her what her future holds, just that there's a very high likelihood that 'success' will be fleeting and this won't be our last series of chemo.
I may be misunderstanding what the author proposes, but if the threat of cancer was reduced to the physiological impacts of dormant tumors, I'm pretty sure we would consider that a win.
Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats
#8A future where cancer is controlled but not cured is just as good and might be easier to achieve. I hope science gets there before I get cancer which is inevitable, unless I die from a heart attack.
Look on the bright side: You might get hit by a bus instead.
Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats
#9Here are some ideas: Look at the functional call stack. Its a slice of the linear address space that’s actively being used and it is strikingly similar to the promoter regions of the genome. Like some pathogens, hackers randomly try to hit that sweet spot that will jump to the special program. Operating systems are like simple biological organisms that evolve in response to various influences (cybersecurity it seems…
I have no idea what the heck you are talking about but is human biology have computation at the core?
Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats
#10Here are some ideas: Look at the functional call stack. Its a slice of the linear address space that’s actively being used and it is strikingly similar to the promoter regions of the genome. Like some pathogens, hackers randomly try to hit that sweet spot that will jump to the special program. Operating systems are like simple biological organisms that evolve in response to various influences (cybersecurity it seems…
I have no idea what you are talking about but does human biology have computation at the core?
Any papers on these?