Before cancer kills, it cheats • Hacker News Board

Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats

#61

Post by Cybiote » Sun, Apr 08, 2018, 12:10 AM UTC

domnomnom wrote: post #55

Cybiote wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 activ…

Can you explain how the analogy is stretched? It’s my personal belief that biologists tend to be fairly implementation focused from how they learn about the systems involved. In biology there is 2 factor authentication to protect against parasitic spoofing, intrusion detection systems, protected kernel memory, memory hierarchy, policy based permission. It a very nice operating system IMO.

Analogies can help but if taken too far, will provide only illusionary knowledge from superficial similarities. Consider, if you trace out the hierarchies induced by interactions in biological networks and then do the same for an OS's call graph, you find quite different topologies reflecting their different priorities. In computers, in part, efficiency and reuse. In biology, robustness, minimized interdependencies, developmental stability and more.

There are things that concern our electronics that do not matter for biology and there are many things biology must allow for that our hardware cannot. Tying things down to the peculiarities of our systems too narrows the scope of applicable models and understanding. Sometimes it is more useful to think in terms of stochastic differential equations than in terms of operating systems.

Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats

#62

Post by tcj_phx » Sun, Apr 08, 2018, 2:11 AM UTC

epmaybe wrote: post #41

tcj_phx wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If one thinks that their ideas on alternative therapies are worth investigating, I would strongly urge them to connect with a scientist that shares similar views, and apply for funding through the NIH. There is a significant amount of funding for complementary and alternative medicine. It's not well known that such funding exists, so I try and let others know about it. I have been tangentially involved with pain rese…

I also have some conventional/non-controversial ideas that ought to be verified - interventions that I have personally verified work as expected. I will look into the NIH's programs for funding these investigations.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats

#63

Post by tasty_freeze » Sun, Apr 08, 2018, 2:24 AM UTC

tcj_phx wrote: post #19

klmr wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> She rightly recognizes the key role of cell autonomous vs. cell non-autonomous processes in how multicellular organisms work. This is an odd comment: This realisation is quite literally at the core of cancer research, and every researcher in the field recognises this. Heck, it’s implied if not mentioned outright in the seminal Hallmarks of Cancer paper [1] that every cancer researcher (and probably generally most h…

> 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…

Reading between your lines, perhaps incorrectly, it seems you are in the camp that cancer treatment is ineffective and it won't get better because it is making people money they way it is.

But the fact is there have been great strides in the survival rate of many kinds of cancer over the past 40 years, even though some are more stubborn than others. It hasn't been dramatic advances for most of it; most of the gains have been slow, incremental improvements that add up over decades.

Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats

#64

Post by vanderZwan » Sun, Apr 08, 2018, 3:20 AM UTC

domnomnom wrote: post #6

Here are some ideas: Look at the functional call stack. Its a slice of the linear address space that’s actively being used and it is strikingly similar to the promoter regions of the genome. Like some pathogens, hackers randomly try to hit that sweet spot that will jump to the special program. Operating systems are like simple biological organisms that evolve in response to various influences (cybersecurity it seems…

> (I don’t think this compressed state can be examined, but compression algorithms are seriously under appreciated)

I once attended a lecture at a physics conference by a guy who basically used gzip to do sequence alignment (using compressibility as a way to measure Kolmogorov complexity). Might be interesting to you. The title was: Blasting and Zipping: Sequence Alignment and Mutual Information

Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats

#65

Post by tcj_phx » Sun, Apr 08, 2018, 7:58 AM UTC

tasty_freeze wrote: post #63

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…

Reading between your lines, perhaps incorrectly, it seems you are in the camp that cancer treatment is ineffective and it won't get better because it is making people money they way it is. But the fact is there have been great strides in the survival rate of many kinds of cancer over the past 40 years, even though some are more stubborn than others. It hasn't been dramatic advances for most of it; most of the gains h…

Improved cancer survival rates may be related to shifting diagnostic patterns. "Pre-cancer" might not have deteriorated into full-blown cancer, but since it was caught it was treated, and marked as a success.

> most of the gains have been slow, incremental improvements that add up over decades.

I read something 1 to 2 years ago about how breast surgeons aren't recommending prophylactic mastectomies anymore. The message hasn't spread very far. The official approach to breast health is at odds with what's actually been discovered by physiologists.

I know a lady who had "colon cancer". I think her actual problem was emotional stress about her son... But she had her colon shortened, and is probably counted as a success by the official medical statisticians.

Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats

#66

Post by sytelus » Sun, Apr 08, 2018, 11:17 AM UTC

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…

The article seemed to me a zero information fluff piece for a researcher. Your comment does a much better job of explaining their work than the author of the article.

Re: Before cancer kills, it cheats

#67

Post by AllegedAlec » Mon, Apr 09, 2018, 9:21 AM UTC

bhickey wrote: post #25

Slime molds are another excellent model for studying cheating. They're typically single cell organisms except when starved. Then they chemotax an aggregate into a multi-cellular organism. At this point they undergo sporulation, producing a stalk and a fruiting body. Cells in the stalk die while those in the fruit are hopefully whisked to greener pastures. When the slimes are homogeneous this works just fine. In a het…

Maree and Hogeweg did some really cool research on Dictyostelium (one of those slime molds). For those interested: http://www.pnas.org/content/98/7/3879