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Do fungi lurking inside cancers speed their growth?

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Re: Do fungi lurking inside cancers speed their growth?

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Animals evolved long before plants. What's crazy is that plants were arguably evolved by fungi using alga to farm sunlight

> Animals evolved long before plants No underwater: algae 3500MY vs sponges, worms, shells 800MY-485MY out of water: plants 470MY vs millipedes, tetrapod 420MY-400MY

quora says animals https://www.quora.com/Which-evolved-first-plants-or-animals

Re: Do fungi lurking inside cancers speed their growth?

#52
post #13

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)

An interesting fact that I learned from the book Metazoa is that biological diversity was greater in the seas than on land, until about 130 million years ago, and then the explosion of diversity on land, at that time and still now, was because of a feedback loop that developed between plants and insects, with the insects allowing greater specialization among the plants, and the greater diversity among plants allowing greater diversity among insects. This was a true feedback loop, in that it would be impossible to say what the starting point was, the insects or the plants.

https://www.amazon.com/Metazoa-Animal-Minds-Birth-Consciousn...

Re: Do fungi lurking inside cancers speed their growth?

#53
> many of the fungal species in question are widespread, which makes sample contamination a serious concern, says Iliev.

> Both research teams got most of their tissue and blood samples from databases, so the samples were not collected with the aim of minimizing fungal contamination, says Bhatt. Although the researchers developed methods to filter any potential contaminants out of the sequencing data, she would like to see the results replicated using samples taken in a sterile environment.

Uh what.

Re: Do fungi lurking inside cancers speed their growth?

#54

> many of the fungal species in question are widespread, which makes sample contamination a serious concern, says Iliev. > Both research teams got most of their tissue and blood samples from databases, so the samples were not collected with the aim of minimizing fungal contamination, says Bhatt. Although the researchers developed methods to filter any potential contaminants out of the sequencing data, she would like…

Yep… perhaps they should make sure the results aren’t total bogus before disseminating.

Re: Do fungi lurking inside cancers speed their growth?

#55
I think we need to credit the Swedish medical system here. They found that people who had taken oral Terbinafine (to treat toenail fungus) had a significantly lower mortality from prostate cancer. This has let to a bunch of studies where terbinafine has been added to cancer treatment with fantastic results.

Re: Do fungi lurking inside cancers speed their growth?

#56
I think we need to credit the Swedish medical system here. They found that people who had taken oral Terbinafine (to treat toenail fungus) had a significantly lower mortality from prostate cancer. This has let to a bunch of studies in Sweden where terbinafine has been added to cancer treatment with fantastic results. This work adds a plausible mechanism for the results.

Re: Do fungi lurking inside cancers speed their growth?

#57

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

Asimov did a story “Hostess” that’s kind of along those lines.

Re: Do fungi lurking inside cancers speed their growth?

#58

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

Well, we are biological machines that would not survive without a spectrum of microbes (e.g., gut bacteria). And to your point, kinda, I sometimes wonder if they exist for us, or we exist for them.

Just ask yourself, who was first?

Re: Do fungi lurking inside cancers speed their growth?

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or tricked into worrying about that as a control signal to perform its main task in service of its microorganism operators ;)

Nobody in this thread has read Selfish Gene, apparently. That's the whole point of the book: That genes may as well have invented all of life to propagate themselves. In this context, species conflict is like fleets of world-ships fighting total war.

> That genes may as well have invented all of life to propagate themselves.

I think the point of the book was, that genes didn't invent anything. They were just the first self-replicating molecules. Everything else had to happen, because they were forced to exist and compete with clones and mutating clones of themselve – a game which we call life today.

Re: Do fungi lurking inside cancers speed their growth?

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody in this thread has read Selfish Gene, apparently. That's the whole point of the book: That genes may as well have invented all of life to propagate themselves. In this context, species conflict is like fleets of world-ships fighting total war.

Genes are effectively biological computer programs.

Somehow akin to a fork-bomb
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