41–50 of 87 posts
Will be interesting if fungi end up slowing cancers and are actually fighting for the mycobiome.
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Reminded me: > Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced. (Terence McKenna)
What about underwater plants? Life started in the water first didn't it?
They played the long game?
My introductory biology classes informed me well enough to understand that fungal infections can weaken the body's immune systems, weaken the tissue, or spread themselves over an inflamed area, with unfortunate side-effects of generating pro-growth local environments. Any of these may lead to an incidental increase in cancer growth. What's more, cancer was such a rare occurrence prior to WWI, you wouldn't expect that…
> cancer was such a rare occurrence prior to WWI why do you say that?
I do remember that the first major pandemic of lung cancer started in the 1920s and the first controlled study of Cigarettes involvement with Lung cancer started in the 1950s - Hill & Doll in the US. A parallel study was started in 1951 in Britain, which ended in 2001.
Prior to that, cancer was routinely written up in case studies and submitted to journals as interesting medical cases.
Sometimes I wonder if we're just giant machines built by microorganisms. It would certainly make an interesting story, along the idea of a robot discovering they were made by somebody else, which I believe has already been explored
Reminded me: > Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced. (Terence McKenna)
While animals and plants share mitochondria, they do not share plastids (chloroplast, chromoplast, etc.).
My introductory biology classes informed me well enough to understand that fungal infections can weaken the body's immune systems, weaken the tissue, or spread themselves over an inflamed area, with unfortunate side-effects of generating pro-growth local environments. Any of these may lead to an incidental increase in cancer growth. What's more, cancer was such a rare occurrence prior to WWI, you wouldn't expect that…
> cancer was such a rare occurrence prior to WWI why do you say that?
They generally disable the mitochondria and burn glucose in a much less efficient anaerobic process.
Areas with malnutrition and lower life expectancy would not grow them very well.
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I think you’re thinking of a Philip K. Dick short story. I’ll see if I can find it. Edit: I was thinking of autofac, which is kind of like what you’re describing but arguably it was only a small plot detail. People get downvoted for the strangest things on here sometimes. In this case it just makes me laugh.
Reminded me of The Electric Ant https://archive.org/details/PhilipK.DickTheElectricAnt I have a hypothesis that commenters sometime interpret recommendations in this format ("I think you're thinking of X") as being presumptive, because it implies someone made a mistake in their thinking. I'm not trying to say it is or isn't, just that I've seen a pattern of similar posts downvoted, and this is my hypothesis as to why…
I've just been trying to remember the movie Prometheus, the discussion between David and Weyland at the beginning where Weyland explains he is David's creator - this, I believe, sort of touches on the same idea - learning someone created you, maybe not very deeply; I'll need to watch it again
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> cancer was such a rare occurrence prior to WWI why do you say that?
Primarily because I don't remember the dates that coincided with the industrial revolution and mass production of cigarettes, alongside demonstrative analytics. I thought 100 years ago was a decent starting point for data. I do remember that the first major pandemic of lung cancer started in the 1920s and the first controlled study of Cigarettes involvement with Lung cancer started in the 1950s - Hill & Doll in the U…
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Reminded me: > Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced. (Terence McKenna)
...except we didn't evolve from plants. While animals and plants share mitochondria, they do not share plastids (chloroplast, chromoplast, etc.). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastid
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That’s an interesting SciFi idea: the real world is digital, and digital beings have created a physical world to fight battle via genetic biological machines, which are effectively concrete data structures.
like the scene in Jurassic park
The bacteria essentially learned to signal to the plant which genes it needed to upregulate to produce the nutrients the bacteria wanted. It created an ideal environment for itself by tricking the host's genes.
Biology has evolved all kinds of ways to manipulate life to its end goals of harnessing energy and reproducing. I wouldn't be surprised to learn if some fungi evolved to use mammalian cells to upregulate biochemical pathways for energy production. Nor would I be shocked if this had the side effect of causing those cells to become cancerous.
[1] Side note : I've smelled a lot of different types of bacteria from growing them. E. coli is pretty neutral as far as bacterial smells go, but Agrobacterium has one of the strongest "foot"-like odors I've ever smelled. It's so distinctive.