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A Contagious Cancer That Jumped Between Species

theatlantic.com

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Re: A Contagious Cancer That Jumped Between Species

#11

Post by platz »

whatshisface wrote: post #5
ItsMe000001 wrote: post #2

When we developed antibiotics we thought we solved the problem. Now we are looking at more and more strains of bacteria resistant to all we got. We have to keep going, turns out we are not done developing antibiotics, forever. So, as I see it, this might show that once we "cured cancer" (I know, there is not "one cancer", and that there won't be that one drug, it's more a dynamic equilibrium), when we think we made i…

Unlike bacteria, cancer must evolve "fresh" in each new host that it develops in. As a result, a cancer treatment that works today will work about as well in the future.

Is cancer just an inevitable threshold one must reach on long enough timeline, due to entropy?

Re: A Contagious Cancer That Jumped Between Species

#12

Post by tbrownaw »

platz wrote: post #11
whatshisface wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike bacteria, cancer must evolve "fresh" in each new host that it develops in. As a result, a cancer treatment that works today will work about as well in the future.

Is cancer just an inevitable threshold one must reach on long enough timeline, due to entropy?

Given sufficient time, everything becomes inevitable.

Re: A Contagious Cancer That Jumped Between Species

#14

Post by maxerickson »

ItsMe000001 wrote: post #2

When we developed antibiotics we thought we solved the problem. Now we are looking at more and more strains of bacteria resistant to all we got. We have to keep going, turns out we are not done developing antibiotics, forever. So, as I see it, this might show that once we "cured cancer" (I know, there is not "one cancer", and that there won't be that one drug, it's more a dynamic equilibrium), when we think we made i…

Treatment resistance occurs with existing treatments:

https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/research/drug-...

So "the" cure for cancer would already be expected to address that problem.

Re: A Contagious Cancer That Jumped Between Species

#15

Post by jjoonathan »

elihu wrote: post #9
whatshisface wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike bacteria, cancer must evolve "fresh" in each new host that it develops in. As a result, a cancer treatment that works today will work about as well in the future.

> “We then realized they were a near perfect match to the cells of another species, the pullet shell.” The cells must have originated there before jumping into the golden carpets. > > Oddly, the pullet shells themselves show no signs of the cancer. They may have given rise to it, but they no longer suffer from it. Why? “One could imagine that the species-of-origin is now resistant to the tumor,” says Goff, “but we do…

Isn't that how agrobacterium works?

Re: A Contagious Cancer That Jumped Between Species

#16

Post by gnulinux »

tbrownaw wrote: post #12
platz wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is cancer just an inevitable threshold one must reach on long enough timeline, due to entropy?

Given sufficient time, everything becomes inevitable.

What does "everything" mean in this sentence? Even things that are not allowed by the "model" of the universe?

Re: A Contagious Cancer That Jumped Between Species

#17

Post by Thriptic »

platz wrote: post #11
whatshisface wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike bacteria, cancer must evolve "fresh" in each new host that it develops in. As a result, a cancer treatment that works today will work about as well in the future.

Is cancer just an inevitable threshold one must reach on long enough timeline, due to entropy?

Yes, basically. Cancer is at heart localized evolution, and there are many, many pathways which can provide survival or reproductive advantages to cells or tissue if they become dysfunctional.

Re: A Contagious Cancer That Jumped Between Species

#18

Post by lkrubner »

platz wrote: post #11
whatshisface wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike bacteria, cancer must evolve "fresh" in each new host that it develops in. As a result, a cancer treatment that works today will work about as well in the future.

Is cancer just an inevitable threshold one must reach on long enough timeline, due to entropy?

Entropy never comes into it because we are not talking about a closed system. So long as a creature can eat food, or synthesize it from the sun's rays, they are an open system taking in substances that give it fresh energy.

You could model this a few ways. You could say a creature exports its entropy by eating food, or you could say, more accurately, that the entropy was created when the energy was stored in chemical form in whatever substances the creature eats.

If there was some ultimate limit on the ability of creatures to communicate information forward then the aging process would apply to the entire species, to life itself, rather than to individual organisms.

You can think of yourself as an organism that was created a few years ago by your mother and father, but as a chemical process, you are 4 billion years old, give or take a few hundred million years. There has not been a single second, in the last 4 billion years, when the chemical reaction that is you was not working to propagate itself forward. If entropy applied to you, then surely you would not have lasted 4 billion years?

Re: A Contagious Cancer That Jumped Between Species

#19

Post by FullMtlAlcoholc »

platz wrote: post #11
whatshisface wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike bacteria, cancer must evolve "fresh" in each new host that it develops in. As a result, a cancer treatment that works today will work about as well in the future.

Is cancer just an inevitable threshold one must reach on long enough timeline, due to entropy?

I'm not a doctor, but I believe cancer is what we call it when cells that evade apoptosis proliferate to reach a critical mass. They metasttisize when they are able to survive a journey through the blood or lymph systems to invade other foreign tissues for food.

I don't believe it's necessarily due to entropy but the process by which cellular division takes place involves a copying of the host cell's DNA and that copying process is not 100% perfect. It is remarkalably accurate, but given enough time, even with all the systems in place to mitigate and repair errors, they will occur. Most will simply cause that mutated cell to die but it's similar to the 100 monkeys on 100 typewriters at scale. Eventually an error will occur that makes a cell immune from apoptosis.

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