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Elephants Rarely Get Cancer, Now We Know Why (2015)

blogs.discovermagazine.com

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Re: Elephants Rarely Get Cancer, Now We Know Why (2015)

#81

Post by neetdeth »

nonbel wrote: post #80
eloff wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So just waving away the insane technology leaps required, if we had a digital copy of our DNA we could theoretically create pristine new stem cells and inject them into our bodies as needed to replace aging cells. You might make such a master copy at birth, or more likely in such a world, you're conceived from the master copy which your parents carefully edited before deciding to have you. Fundamentally we could live…

The "master copy" would be at conception. Even after a few divisions it is unlikely any of the cells carry the exact same DNA. And just because you made it from zygote to birth does not mean your master copy was "pristine". But yeah, if you could somehow replace your tissue stem cells in situ with ones that are closer to the original state it would generally allow your body to continue functioning for much longer. I…

You don’t have any single non-degraded copy but you do have billions of degraded copies. Assuming errors are non-correlated, one ought to be able to reconstruct the original sequence given enough of them.

The idea would be to use some far-future technology to enable a kind of DNA repair that cells themselves can’t do, using non-local information from other cells in the organism.

Re: Elephants Rarely Get Cancer, Now We Know Why (2015)

#82

Post by nonbel »

neetdeth wrote: post #81
nonbel wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "master copy" would be at conception. Even after a few divisions it is unlikely any of the cells carry the exact same DNA. And just because you made it from zygote to birth does not mean your master copy was "pristine". But yeah, if you could somehow replace your tissue stem cells in situ with ones that are closer to the original state it would generally allow your body to continue functioning for much longer. I…

You don’t have any single non-degraded copy but you do have billions of degraded copies. Assuming errors are non-correlated, one ought to be able to reconstruct the original sequence given enough of them. The idea would be to use some far-future technology to enable a kind of DNA repair that cells themselves can’t do, using non-local information from other cells in the organism.

Most mutations are probably large scale chromosomal missegregation, etc where huge chunks get moved around or duplicated/deleted rather than just replacing/removing/adding a single nucleotide. From what I have read something like that happens about once every 10 divisions per cell line.

So I think that could be more difficult than you expect.

Re: Elephants Rarely Get Cancer, Now We Know Why (2015)

#83

Post by eloff »

nonbel wrote: post #82
neetdeth wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t have any single non-degraded copy but you do have billions of degraded copies. Assuming errors are non-correlated, one ought to be able to reconstruct the original sequence given enough of them. The idea would be to use some far-future technology to enable a kind of DNA repair that cells themselves can’t do, using non-local information from other cells in the organism.

Most mutations are probably large scale chromosomal missegregation, etc where huge chunks get moved around or duplicated/deleted rather than just replacing/removing/adding a single nucleotide. From what I have read something like that happens about once every 10 divisions per cell line. So I think that could be more difficult than you expect.

I think the same statistical methods apply to cancel the noise.

Re: Elephants Rarely Get Cancer, Now We Know Why (2015)

#84

Post by mikehotel »

D-Coder wrote: post #76
mikehotel wrote: post #25

An old video [1] in response to this old article may indicate another reason why elephants dont get cancer, and provide easier way to replicate those results than gene therapy or splicing. Hint: go vegan. [1] https://nutritionfacts.org/video/how-not-to-die-from-cancer/...

Do human vegans get less cancer? (Honest question.)

There are studies on this, however they are controversial since diet is not easy to control amongst study subjects. Also, there are vested interests keeping public opinion divided on this matter.

One study from 2014: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3565018/ This compared non-vegetarians with multiple types of vegetarian diets.

> Conclusion: Vegetarian diets seem to confer protection against cancer.

> Impact: Vegan diet seems to confer lower risk for overall and female-specific cancer compared to other dietary patterns. The lacto-ovo-vegetarian diets seem to confer protection from cancers of the gastrointestinal tract.

A more recent perspective on the topic of diet as a cancer risk: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01635581.2017.1...

> Abstract: The role that nutrition plays in cancer development and treatment has received considerable attention in recent decades, but it still engenders considerable controversy. Within the cancer research and especially the clinical community, for example, nutritional factors are considered to play, at best, a secondary role. The role of nutrition in cancer development was noted by authorities as far back as the early 1800s, generally under the theory that cancer is "constitutional" in its origin, implying a complex, multifactorial, multistage etiology. Opponents of this idea insisted, rather vigorously, that cancer is a local unifactorial disease, best treated through surgery, with little attention paid to the etiology and possible prevention of cancer. This "local" theory, developed during the late 1700s and early 1800s, gradually included, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, chemotherapy and radiotherapy as treatment modalities, which now remain, along with surgery, as the basis of present-day cancer treatment. This highly reductionist paradigm left in its wake unfortunate consequences for the present day, which is the subject of this perspective.

(I am citing the second publication only in defense of my original comment, for future reference. In retrospect, when discussing health benefits of diet, I should have used the term whole food plant based diet instead of vegan to avoid the baggage that term carries.)

Re: Elephants Rarely Get Cancer, Now We Know Why (2015)

#85

Post by nonbel »

eloff wrote: post #83
nonbel wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most mutations are probably large scale chromosomal missegregation, etc where huge chunks get moved around or duplicated/deleted rather than just replacing/removing/adding a single nucleotide. From what I have read something like that happens about once every 10 divisions per cell line. So I think that could be more difficult than you expect.

I think the same statistical methods apply to cancel the noise.

I doubt it, it isn't like the average is going to correspond to the actual original sequence.

Re: Elephants Rarely Get Cancer, Now We Know Why (2015)

#86

Post by bohm »

nonbel wrote: post #80
eloff wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So just waving away the insane technology leaps required, if we had a digital copy of our DNA we could theoretically create pristine new stem cells and inject them into our bodies as needed to replace aging cells. You might make such a master copy at birth, or more likely in such a world, you're conceived from the master copy which your parents carefully edited before deciding to have you. Fundamentally we could live…

The "master copy" would be at conception. Even after a few divisions it is unlikely any of the cells carry the exact same DNA. And just because you made it from zygote to birth does not mean your master copy was "pristine". But yeah, if you could somehow replace your tissue stem cells in situ with ones that are closer to the original state it would generally allow your body to continue functioning for much longer. I…

It's worth pointing out that YC startup foreverlabs.com does freeze your stem cells for precisely that reason.

Re: Elephants Rarely Get Cancer, Now We Know Why (2015)

#87

Post by eloff »

bohm wrote: post #86
nonbel wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "master copy" would be at conception. Even after a few divisions it is unlikely any of the cells carry the exact same DNA. And just because you made it from zygote to birth does not mean your master copy was "pristine". But yeah, if you could somehow replace your tissue stem cells in situ with ones that are closer to the original state it would generally allow your body to continue functioning for much longer. I…

It's worth pointing out that YC startup foreverlabs.com does freeze your stem cells for precisely that reason.

Interesting! Not a bad idea given there will likely be more stem cell based treatments available in the future. The cost benefit analysis seems to make sense to me.
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