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Before cancer kills, it cheats

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Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats

#31

Post by jcims »

spyspy wrote: post #12
jcims wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

Always relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/931/ really helped visualize for me what going through cancer treatment is like. God speed.

This pretty much nails it. Thank you.

Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats

#32

Post by scythe »

breckinloggins wrote: post #27
danharaj wrote: post #22

> This is what cancer cells do: Proliferate without limit, avoid cell death, monopolize resources, co-opt the labor of other cells, and destroy the surrounding environment. Rings a bell

I was thinking the same thing. Those locust plagues are hugely devastating... Thinking beyond the snark for a bit, though, locusts might be an example of a species-level cancer cheating the “rules” of a habitat. Humans? We just throw the rules away altogether and have historically written new ones that only apply to us. The difference between us and locusts, though, is that many of us fight back against our own short…

There's an important difference between a tumor and an organism: one can sustain itself, the other is a parasite. So what would obviously put humans over the line? Establishing self-sufficient colonies off Earth seems to be beyond the reach of any swarm of locusts, but possibly viable in a 1000-2000 year timespan for people.

Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats

#33

Post by tcj_phx »

epmaybe wrote: post #29
tcj_phx wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it doesn’t hold any striking new insights. All of this is not merely known but in fact fundamental knowledge. A lot of "fundamental knowledge" in medicine is wrong. The genetic theory of cancer has always been a dead-end, because it reverses cause and effect. The cancer industry has encouraged "kill all the cancer cells" treatments because it's convenient for their business model. The cancer treatment situation…

Your comment is misleading. Certain cancers are indeed 'caused' by genetic changes, and researchers are actively looking for ways to prevent those genetic changes from occuring in the first place. But do you really tell someone with a familial mutation that we know causes thyroid cancer that they should be on a ketogenic diet? Most therapeutics today are developed knowing that they will not have a substantially more…

Your comment history suggests that you've been through medical school.

I like to say that sometimes doctors do good work, and sometimes they make work for themselves. Please take this response as a gentle and well-intended effort to protest the standard practices that hurt patients by 'missing the forest for the trees', such as I've observed in my own family (who themselves are employed in the conventional approach to medicine), and my girlfriend (who is being harmed by allopathic psychiatry).

Did you know that the term 'allopathy' was coined by a homeopath? At the time bloodletting, calomel, and blister agents were the standard of care. Homeopathic medicine held that the body can fix itself when properly supported (diet, clean environment, etc). Allopathic medical practitioners engage in the heroic struggle against disease [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroic_medicine

Allopathic medicine never went away, it just changed form. While conventional medical practitioners are doing much better than 200 years ago (w.r.t. not killing their patients), from my perspective, conventional psychiatry and conventional cancer treatments leave much to be desired.

> To suggest that increased research into the Warburg effect is going to be the thing that leads to an explosion in novel therapeutics for cancer is wishful thinking, as far as I'm concerned.

I have some great anecdotes about cheap metabolic therapies. But they're just my non-rigorous anecdotes... The one person who I'd most like to experiment on, trusts her doctors because they wear the halo of 'conventionality'.

> Cancer is complex, and while we could stand to learn more about metabolic changes in cancer, there's not going to be a magic pill for this one.

Consider the possibility that cancer is much simpler than the geneticists have led us to believe. Sometimes 'we must unlearn, what we have learned'.

Edit: google scholar turns up some papers about 'spontaneous remission' of cancer. To figure out how to induce spontaneous remission of cancer cells would be a revolutionary advance.

Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats

#34

Post by danharaj »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #30
gshubert17 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. What can society, which creates corporations, do to limit the likelihood that they will "go rogue" to harm society?

I think the person you are responding to is alluding to humans, not corporations.

Only under certain circumstances. It's not inevitable that we be this way. Our most powerful societies cultivate a condition where our economic activity is this way.

Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats

#35

Post by lotsofpulp »

scythe wrote: post #32
breckinloggins wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking the same thing. Those locust plagues are hugely devastating... Thinking beyond the snark for a bit, though, locusts might be an example of a species-level cancer cheating the “rules” of a habitat. Humans? We just throw the rules away altogether and have historically written new ones that only apply to us. The difference between us and locusts, though, is that many of us fight back against our own short…

There's an important difference between a tumor and an organism: one can sustain itself, the other is a parasite. So what would obviously put humans over the line? Establishing self-sufficient colonies off Earth seems to be beyond the reach of any swarm of locusts, but possibly viable in a 1000-2000 year timespan for people.

Ignoring timescale, modeling a single tumor as a parasite of humans seems the same as modeling humanity as parasites of nature/world/universe.

Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats

#36

Post by wobbly99 »

gshubert17 wrote: post #26
danharaj wrote: post #22

> This is what cancer cells do: Proliferate without limit, avoid cell death, monopolize resources, co-opt the labor of other cells, and destroy the surrounding environment. Rings a bell

Agreed. What can society, which creates corporations, do to limit the likelihood that they will "go rogue" to harm society?

Regulate them, limit them and in extreme cases kill them. And the thought that corporations are cancers of human societies that cheat is not a new.

Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats

#37

Post by leereeves »

tcj_phx wrote: post #33
epmaybe wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is misleading. Certain cancers are indeed 'caused' by genetic changes, and researchers are actively looking for ways to prevent those genetic changes from occuring in the first place. But do you really tell someone with a familial mutation that we know causes thyroid cancer that they should be on a ketogenic diet? Most therapeutics today are developed knowing that they will not have a substantially more…

Your comment history suggests that you've been through medical school. I like to say that sometimes doctors do good work, and sometimes they make work for themselves. Please take this response as a gentle and well-intended effort to protest the standard practices that hurt patients by 'missing the forest for the trees', such as I've observed in my own family (who themselves are employed in the conventional approach t…

> To figure out how to induce spontaneous remission of cancer cells would be a revolutionary advance.

There's a lot of work being done on that front, primarily in the form of inducing an immune response to cancer.

This work is being done in "allopathic" medical schools and hospitals and in biology labs that are the source of most allopathic medicine.

If this work succeeds, it might lead to a cancer vaccine: the kind of treatment sometimes opposed by homeopaths and naturopaths.

Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats

#39

Post by Cybiote »

thraway180306 wrote: post #11
smallhands wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea what you are talking about but does human biology have computation at the core? Any papers on these?

biology have computation at the core? Doubtful. You can to computing with DNA http://dna.caltech.edu but it is still debated if the actual role of DNA is being a code (some recently weasel out form that stance by saying it's an “app”, like there's a difference, machine code being a code). Coding theory applied to DNA yields inconclusive results. Galois theory usually has power over any kind of information encoding, c…

Linking biology to specific concepts in computer architecture or worse, with OS design, is indeed a stretched analogy but biology is rich with computation. I'll try to be short.

A cell must sense and respond to its environment. One aspect of this is regulation of gene activity by interactions of for example, transcription factors. When interaction types can be well enough approximated as either of inhibition or activation, you can model them with boolean networks and when levels matter, some have found moderate success with recurrent neural networks under a restriction on what NN nodes represent, to ease interpretability.

That is not the same thing as saying your genome unrolls neural networks. What it is actually saying is that the complexity of the best performing neural network indicates the richness of the underlying computation, and the predictive accuracy of the model captures the functional equivalence of the respective computations (in the cell and in the neural network). The learned model is the instance and neural networks are the class, it is a mistake to place emphasis on neural network, they are merely a way of packaging the computational model of interest.

A cursory review here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001048251...

If you have time for videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA9D727AGHI , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZX-GrO2qXQM

More relevant to this article is the study of cancer within the framework of evolutionary game theory, as done here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2768082/

There is a precise correspondence between that formulation and one done in terms of online sequential prediction or the so called experts algorithm. All of these are models and still quite limited at that but biology is complex and the future lies in the development and leveraging of these rich connections.

Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats

#40

Post by bhl »

wgerard wrote: post #17

Hah! Wow that's a blast. I used to work at a lab as an undergrad that worked on extremely similar topics, though the cancer link was more implied: http://research.fhcrc.org/shou/en.html We had four yeast systems: Two cooperative yeast systems (exchanged metabolites the other needed to survive), and two cheater systems (needed those same metabolites to survive, but just took from the system and never gave back). One e…

Your post kind of reminds of two other articles along the same concept: [1] http://ncase.me/trust/ [2] https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-to-triumph-and-cooperate-...
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