9 ms·

How cancer was created by evolution

132 points by lookupmobile 10y ago

areyoucrazy 10y ago
It is there for a reason. Cancer should not be treated at all. Instead, people who have a problem should kill themselves and therefore die on their own terms, instead of slow and painful degeneration. What is the point of living anyway?
narrator 10y ago
These two paragraphs don't follow: "Figures like this show that cancer is not only extremely pervasive, but also becoming more and more common. But why will so many people develop the disease at some point in their lives?" "The fact that tumours are constantly changing their genetic makeup is one of the reasons why cancers are so hard to "kill". The article's faulty reasoning seems to imply that cancer is more and more common because of evolution. The scientist's work is examining the evolution of a cancer's cells since its initial genesis in the patient. Unless cancer is transmissible between individuals, there is no on-going evolution in cancer that is making it more efficient across the pathology of multiple patients. Thus, this doesn't add much to our knowledge of why cancer is more and more common.
- jjtheblunt 10y ago
  some cancers are transmissible (HPV-induced, for instance, and those of the tasmanian devils, the list goes on and on, not kidding)
  - echelon 10y ago
    The cancer caused by HPV is not transmissible. The virus that causes it is. Transmissible cancer is possible, but it's of almost negligible risk to humans [1, 2]. [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3228048/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3228048/ [2] http://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2015/p1104-parasite-tumors.html http://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2015/p1104-parasite-tumors...
    - cma 10y ago
      There are four known ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonally_transmissible_cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonally_transmissible_cancer But we have started doing things like making stem-cell lines that have surface markers removed and are compatible with almost anyone..
      - maxerickson 10y ago
        Fortunately we tend not to angrily bite each other as a greeting.
        cma 10y ago
        They don't all require that: > Canine transmissible venereal tumor (CTVT) is sexually transmitted cancer in dogs. It was experimentally transplanted between dogs in 1876 by M. A. Novinsky (1841–1914). A single malignant clone of CTVT cells has colonized dogs worldwide, representing the oldest known malignant cell line in continuous propagation.
  - afarrell 10y ago
    Fun fact: an HPV vaccine that covers even more varieties of HPV was approved by the FDA a year ago.
- redka 10y ago
  > The article's faulty reasoning seems to imply that cancer is more and more common because of evolution No, it doesn't. It just says that there is more of it, mostly because we live longer and smoke cigarettes and such.
- ddebernardy 10y ago
  The article addresses why it's more and more common. Specifically, it suggests our cells haven't evolved to live that long, so if you're older than 40, then at some point or another your cells will mutate - which may or may not get the attention of your immune system.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- cel1ne 10y ago
  Has this idea of "more cancer" been controlled on 1. population generally getting older and 2. more people getting diagnosed?
  - ambrop7 10y ago
    Also more people getting their life prolonged by cancer treatment?
- thinkloop 10y ago
  > "Figures like this show that cancer is not only extremely pervasive, but also becoming more and more common. But why will so many people develop the disease at some point in their lives?" You're right, the article did a bit of trickery here conflating general human evolution, with the main point of the article about cancer's isolated evolution within the host. The line that attempts to support this follows: "Large and complicated animals like humans [aka lots of 'evolution'] are vulnerable to cancer precisely because they are large and complicated". This claim is not supported by the article, and not the main point - but it's also just part of the intro and doesn't take away much either, chalk it up to journalistic creativity. > "The fact that tumours are constantly changing their genetic makeup is one of the reasons why cancers are so hard to "kill" That's what tfa is all about. In summary: - cancers reproduce/evolve within a host optimizing against the body's defenses as well as the treatments we provide - our treatments are effective at first, but since the cancer keeps evolving, they are all eventually rendered useless - if the evolution is the problem, what if we try stopping that? And that's what they're studying: - find the specific meds that stop a particular cancer by giving them to the patient and seeing if it kills it - as soon as u find them, stop giving them, so that the cancer doesn't go into hyper evolution against them - let the cancer grow fat and lazy suffocating itself with a high-proportion of easily killable cells - re-apply the medicine in full force to kill the whole thing
danieltillett 10y ago
I wish we spent more time studying why elephants [1] and bowhead whales [2] don't get cancer more often than they do. If we knew exactly why their cells are so resistant to cancer we would have some ideas of what we need to do to make ours the same. 1. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26447685 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26447685 2. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25565328 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25565328
- joering2 10y ago
  Slim chances. I'm sorry to say that but most cancer research you hear of in media don't want to cure cancer. Its just a business. Otherwise Apple could throw 40 billions of $ in it and come up wit ha cure. At least in USA, it become such a fat cow to milk that foundations grew everywhere out of nowhere... go to your local store and say "no thank you" when cashier ask you "would you like to donate to fight cancer" and see their look like you are a murderer or something. Its next to "charity" best way for crooks to get rich tax-free while sucking on unaware populus.
  - JakeAl 10y ago
    There are plenty of cures for cancer. They just don't all work all of the time on all people and it's not necessarily permanent. It all depends on the type of cancer and what the cause is. You can get the cancer in any cell in your body and often you have more than one type at a time. Plus the treatment for preventing a recurrence can be just as unhealthy as the disease. That's why there can be so many variations in treatment and survival rates. The biggest thing you are trying to stay ahead of is the cancer spreading to your lymph nodes which is where the anti-bodies and white blood cells that power your immune system are made. Crippling these makes you susceptible to other diseases like every day bacterial infections and viruses which then could end up killing you. It's certainly not because they don't want to cure cancer. Most cancers (80%) can be prevented though, and 70% of them are associated with HPV, a virus that is transmitted through sex. This is why sleeping around is unhealthy. You could be spreading it to every one you sleep with orally as well as genitally. (just another reason marrying your first love and being monogamous is healthy behavior). HPV has been associated with cervical cancer, breast cancer, throat cancer, prostate cancer, mouth cancer (noticing the pattern...). And that's just one factor associated with cancer. Eating healthy (fruits an dveggies, lower red meat especially meat treated with chemicals) reduces other types of cancers associated with your digestive system like colon cancer (and is good for the heart and circulatory system which starts affecting you the closer you get to 50). Basically your arteries harden and your circulation gets poorer as you age and that results in other problems that creep up like high or low blood pressure that causes things like chronic headaches or numb feet, being overweight which can also lead to diabetes, etc. If you take care of yourself when you are young you will have fewer problems as you age, but they are inevitable the older you get. But sometimes cancer is just a genetic mutation you inherited and you will get it anyway.
brute 10y ago
> "The figures are even worse in the UK. According to Cancer Research UK, 54% of men and 48% of women will get cancer at some point in their lives." I am not sure if this is a good or a bad thing. If you accept that cancer is simply the disease you get when you live long enough and don't die because of anything else before (a view even supported by the article), a higher percentage could also mean that all other things are in control now, and only cancer and heart attacks are left.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  So we hear about how eating healthy and exercise and yada yada help your cancer and heart attack risks. How much would each go down if we were perfect? My gut feeling is we could fix 75% of current heart attacks with weight control + exercise + whatever, but only say 25% of cancer... i.e. that heart attacks are very much in the group of things we know how to fix, whereas cancer is still very much in the group of things we don't know how to fix. But curious what the real numbers are...
  - dota_fanatic 10y ago
    Well, I suspect many things regarding health are outside of anyone's control. Ie. if you're a living organism in 2016 on planet Earth, then you probably are negatively affected due to pollution caused by humans, let individuals hope they're lucky. There's lot of nasty stuff out there that we've made and let loose on purpose or by accident. You can't have an ideally healthy lifestyle when all up and down the ecological chain our handiwork is present (people like to make money with the least amount of effort on their part).
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    How prevalent is cancer amongst regular sport fans ?
- hutzlibu 10y ago
  > all other things are in control now, and only cancer and heart attacks are left. Really? What about parkinson etc?
Kip9000 10y ago
What if cancer is the evolution in action. Evolution has to go through a huge number of permutations to get a viable macro organism. By trying to cure cancer, we are trying to withhold the natural selection in some form and preventing the next stage of evolution.
- eru 10y ago
  There is no such thing as `next stage of evolution'. Evolution doesn't have stages. Also, we are only interested in curing cancer in humans (and perhaps at most livestock). Wild animals will still get cancer. (Do plants and funghi etc get cancer?)
  - Kip9000 10y ago
    Humans evolution can be characterised into major stages from ape to homosapien.
    - quonn 10y ago
      No it can't. There were only many small adaptions, not stages. Stages also suggests that there is a next stage to evolve to which is not correct.
      - Kip9000 10y ago
        You are conflating 'evolution is directionless' with 'no stages'. Stages can only be seen when looking back at the evolutionary history. For example: Study reveals human body has gone through four stages of evolution (http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-08/bu-srh083115.php http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-08/bu-srh083115....) http://www.pnas.org/content/112/37/11524.abstract http://www.pnas.org/content/112/37/11524.abstract
        eru 10y ago
        Stages are a human abstraction that help us understand and make sense.
ekianjo 10y ago
All this talk about tobacco but nothing about alcohol, for which there is much stronger evidence of DNA damage? Does the BBC have a hidden conflict of interest?
- lunula 10y ago
  Do you have a link supporting the DNA damage and alcohol relationship? That's interesting. Lung cancers are particular in that they feature an incredible amount of somatic mutation. If I remember its at least 10x as much as the next high-mutation rate cancer. Probably more even. Smoking tobacco provides a melange of mutagens: complex aromatic DNA adducts that result from combustion, heavy oils, and radiation from potassium heavy fertilizer. These would be enough to cause problems alone, but to make things as bad as possible the active ingredient is a critical signaling molecule in the cell cycle, which after copious application is likely to induce the survival of cells unresponsive to it. These cells are less likely to play nice with others.
  - fsloth 10y ago
    "Do you have a link supporting the DNA damage and alcohol relationship? That's interesting." Not the op but alcoholics are likelier to develop e.g. pancreatic cancer. I believe the direct mechanism, though, is not explained. "About 7 out of 10 cases of chronic pancreatitis are due to long term heavy drinking": http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/type/pancreatic-cancer/about/pancreatic-cancer-risks-and-causes http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/type/pancreatic...
noam87 10y ago
> But a more telling reason for the rise is that humans, on average, live a lot longer than they used to. "If you live long enough you will get cancer," says Biankin. I keep hearing this, but do we have data that shows that cancer rates have not changed within age groups? Average lifespan is skewed by much higher infant mortality rates of the past: an average lifespan of 45 doesn't mean everybody was dropping dead at 45; it means more people were dying during their infancy and youth.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  A 20 year old roman could expect to live to ~50: http://www.richardcarrier.info/lifetbl.html http://www.richardcarrier.info/lifetbl.html In the US in 1900, a 20 year old could expect to live to ~62: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html Today, a 20 year old can expect to make it to about 80. So the gains aren't really limited to infant and child mortality. A substantial portion of the gain has certainly come from improvements there though.
  - LionessLover 10y ago
    But the gains at age may come from other areas and not from medicine. In this talk http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/return-of-the-microbes-how-infections-are-once-more-taking-over http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/return-of-the-m... the professor mentions as an aside (there is a transcript of the talk) > And what is interesting, if you take out the childhood mortality, the Victorian person between 1850 and 1880 lived slightly longer, if he was a male, than you do today. Females had the risk if child birth, an area where medicine did do a lot. It shows that sanitation/hygiene and food seem to have done a lot for lower mortality outside the risk factors of being very young and/or giving birth. And that was before antibiotics! Which is nice to know when we get another doom article about the end of antibiotics, because it seems that while sure individuals will suffer it by no means warrants predictions of doom for mankind.
msdos 10y ago
In the US, the lifetime risk of developing cancer is 42% in men and 38% in women Woah, this isn't far from saying living in the US isn't far from a coin toss for a death sentence.
- smt88 10y ago
  Not if you don't smoke. Smoking accounts for ~30% of cancer deaths in the US. A substantial number of the rest are due to skin cancer (lots of white people descended from Northern Europeans living in sunny climates).
- sgift 10y ago
  Luckily, cancer isn't a death sentence anymore. It is really, really shitty. REALLY shitty. But it is not a certain death sentence.
- whamlastxmas 10y ago
  There are lots of types of cancers. Some of the most common types (skin and prostate) aren't really much of a detriment to life expectancy.
  - msdos 10y ago
    This explains it. Thanks.
sandworm101 10y ago
One has to wonder why we age in the first place. No doubt we have evolved to age because a species that does not die off cannot evolve. The advantages of living longer eventually are outweighed by the pressure to evolve more rapidly. So if we see age as an evolved trait, might cancer be part of that endgame? Or at least, our growing susceptibility to cancer and other diseases as we age evolved specifically to kill off the old so as to make room for new generations. This of course would have evolved long long ago, back before we were mammals. As only a handful of the most primitive animals are essentially immortal (jellyfish and the like) this would seem a very successful evolutionary trait.
- Ericson2314 10y ago
  Why the downvotes? There are other articles (on HN recently!) that postulate that aging is evolved. Now yes cancer itself, as mutation caused, can't really be a trait of the host (I go as far as to consider cancer cells a separate parasitic species). And since many cancers are immortal, and the aging relates to a secession of cell division in some sense they are opposite extremes with normal development in the middle. But in being opposites they are related---end games / limitation for multicellularity.
astazangasta 10y ago
While Swanton's work is great in revealing how difficult it is to contain a tumor and how evolution allows escape from therapy and in exposing genetic diversity in tumors, the idea that you can "chop at the root of the tree" is (in my opinion) bunkum. First of all, even if you target trunk mutations you can evolve resistance. Second, you can't just keep loading up drugs into patients; they can often barely tolerate one of these therapies (which have off-target effects on normal cells), combination therapies compound the problem.
fiatmoney 10y ago
The most horrifying story I know of is canine transmissible venereal cancer. It used to be a dog, but was more evolutionarily successful evolving into a tumor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canine_transmissible_venereal_tumor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canine_transmissible_venereal_...
- ashitlerferad 10y ago
  The Tasmanian Devil facial cancer is another horrific transmissible cancer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumor_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumor_disease
- Ericson2314 10y ago
  Good thing it seems not too lethal?
  - lostlogin 10y ago
    It seems fairly debilitating in late stages. The Tasmanian devil's one seems to be threatening the species, which is rather serious.
    - Ericson2314 10y ago
      Yeah I mean as horrifying as "std cancer" is, "species-threatening cancer" is objectively worse.
- austinjp 10y ago
  "It used to be a dog" is a truly provocative phrase, not in a bad way. Fascinating.
more_original 10y ago
This reminds me of this culture of cancer cells from a woman who died from cancer in the 50s. The cancer is still alive in laboratories today and there were even proposals to classify it as a new species: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa
- saiya-jin 10y ago
  ex-gf was working with "her" cells some 6-8 years ago while researching some rare type of anemia, back in Prague. Didn't know it's actually used worldwide. one way to become immortal in some sense :)
  - masklinn 10y ago
    That is the name of Rebecca Skloot's excellent book on the subject: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal_Life_of_Henrietta_Lacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal_Life_of_Henrietta...)
tokenadult 10y ago
From the article: "In the US there has been a 25% decline in death rate in the last two decades. 'More than half of that decline is driven by cancer prevention activities," says Brawley. "This points to the fact that some of the cancers that would previously have killed people had been prevented. Almost a third of death from cancer in the US has been attributed to cigarette smoking, for example. This makes tobacco "the single most preventable cause of death in the world", according to Cancer Research UK." Never starting a smoking habit, or quitting a smoking habit if you have already started, is a great way to prevent a lot cancer risk. Being moderate (not excessive) in alcohol use helps a lot too. http://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention http://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention
albrtpro 10y ago
The sad truth is above 80% of the food you can find in a U.S. supermarket is transgenic or otherwise called GMO. All sorts of carbohydrate sources - which comprise a huge part of the U.S. diet - from cereals, refined sugars and the base of the american diet: corn fructose. Vegetables and meat that's been grown with also GMO feed has been genetically modified and released to the public without enough testing. One of the consequences is cancer. Cancer grows because the quality of your food, the biotechnology embedded in it and american eating habits are incredibly unhealthy and unsuited for its lifestyle. Research the lobbying between FDA and Monsanto, research the correlation between meat consumption and risk of heart disease and cancer, research the recommended daily intake of fibre and compare it to the average american diet, see the correlation with cancer. There lies the answer. This article is a lie. Monopolies ALWAYS create complexity (Zero to One - Peter Thiel). Here are what your typical bullshitting articles say: - Cancer is a living entity, like a virus. - Cancer is way more complex than we thought! - Cancer keeps growing and it's unstoppable - We still don't know how cancer is created Start here: https://nutritionfacts.org https://nutritionfacts.org I lived this on my own skin with my mum getting cancer. This article has been completely lobbied by the pharmaceutical industry. No doubt.
- jrlocke 10y ago
  There is certainly no scientific consensus that GMO/transgenic food causes cancer; if anything the community believes it does not. Perhaps we currently have flaws in implementation (e.g., Roundup-ready crops could lead to increased human exposure to the herbicide), but why is GMO itself a problem? Adding genes from harmless cold water fish to harmless standard tomatoes in order to produce cold resistant tomatoes, for example, seems to be a safe procedure. I would love to be pointed to credible studies that contradict my way of thinking about this.
  - albrtpro 10y ago
    You are right about consensus. But I invite you to investigate how big the cancer industry is in worth/year and historically how it all has been created, and who owns it. Also to study the history of the American food industrialisation. Also to investigate who owns and influences the top media sources in the world. To be clear the point I was trying to make wasn't "GMO is the only cause of cancer" or "Genetical modifications on foods produce cancer". My point is "Current GMO products consumption is one of the contributors to cancer" - I'm not stating how, I'm stating that it has an effect. I know far more about the effects of meat and dairy than I do about GMO. But somewhere to get started would be here: http://nutritionfacts.org/video/are-gmos-safe-the-case-of-roundup-ready-soy/ http://nutritionfacts.org/video/are-gmos-safe-the-case-of-ro... (The page has links to all the scientific sources cited)

132 points by lookupmobile 10y ago

It is there for a reason. Cancer should not be treated at all. Instead, people who have a problem should kill themselves and therefore die on their own terms, instead of slow and painful degeneration. What is the point of living anyway?

narrator 10y ago

These two paragraphs don't follow: "Figures like this show that cancer is not only extremely pervasive, but also becoming more and more common. But why will so many people develop the disease at some point in their lives?" "The fact that tumours are constantly changing their genetic makeup is one of the reasons why cancers are so hard to "kill". The article's faulty reasoning seems to imply that cancer is more and more common because of evolution. The scientist's work is examining the evolution of a cancer's cells since its initial genesis in the patient. Unless cancer is transmissible between individuals, there is no on-going evolution in cancer that is making it more efficient across the pathology of multiple patients. Thus, this doesn't add much to our knowledge of why cancer is more and more common.

jjtheblunt 10y ago
some cancers are transmissible (HPV-induced, for instance, and those of the tasmanian devils, the list goes on and on, not kidding)
- echelon 10y ago
  The cancer caused by HPV is not transmissible. The virus that causes it is. Transmissible cancer is possible, but it's of almost negligible risk to humans [1, 2]. [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3228048/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3228048/ [2] http://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2015/p1104-parasite-tumors.html http://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2015/p1104-parasite-tumors...
  - cma 10y ago
    There are four known ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonally_transmissible_cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonally_transmissible_cancer But we have started doing things like making stem-cell lines that have surface markers removed and are compatible with almost anyone..
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      Fortunately we tend not to angrily bite each other as a greeting.
      - cma 10y ago
        They don't all require that: > Canine transmissible venereal tumor (CTVT) is sexually transmitted cancer in dogs. It was experimentally transplanted between dogs in 1876 by M. A. Novinsky (1841–1914). A single malignant clone of CTVT cells has colonized dogs worldwide, representing the oldest known malignant cell line in continuous propagation.
- afarrell 10y ago
  Fun fact: an HPV vaccine that covers even more varieties of HPV was approved by the FDA a year ago.
redka 10y ago
> The article's faulty reasoning seems to imply that cancer is more and more common because of evolution No, it doesn't. It just says that there is more of it, mostly because we live longer and smoke cigarettes and such.
ddebernardy 10y ago
The article addresses why it's more and more common. Specifically, it suggests our cells haven't evolved to live that long, so if you're older than 40, then at some point or another your cells will mutate - which may or may not get the attention of your immune system.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
cel1ne 10y ago
Has this idea of "more cancer" been controlled on 1. population generally getting older and 2. more people getting diagnosed?
- ambrop7 10y ago
  Also more people getting their life prolonged by cancer treatment?
thinkloop 10y ago
> "Figures like this show that cancer is not only extremely pervasive, but also becoming more and more common. But why will so many people develop the disease at some point in their lives?" You're right, the article did a bit of trickery here conflating general human evolution, with the main point of the article about cancer's isolated evolution within the host. The line that attempts to support this follows: "Large and complicated animals like humans [aka lots of 'evolution'] are vulnerable to cancer precisely because they are large and complicated". This claim is not supported by the article, and not the main point - but it's also just part of the intro and doesn't take away much either, chalk it up to journalistic creativity. > "The fact that tumours are constantly changing their genetic makeup is one of the reasons why cancers are so hard to "kill" That's what tfa is all about. In summary: - cancers reproduce/evolve within a host optimizing against the body's defenses as well as the treatments we provide - our treatments are effective at first, but since the cancer keeps evolving, they are all eventually rendered useless - if the evolution is the problem, what if we try stopping that? And that's what they're studying: - find the specific meds that stop a particular cancer by giving them to the patient and seeing if it kills it - as soon as u find them, stop giving them, so that the cancer doesn't go into hyper evolution against them - let the cancer grow fat and lazy suffocating itself with a high-proportion of easily killable cells - re-apply the medicine in full force to kill the whole thing

danieltillett 10y ago

I wish we spent more time studying why elephants [1] and bowhead whales [2] don't get cancer more often than they do. If we knew exactly why their cells are so resistant to cancer we would have some ideas of what we need to do to make ours the same. 1. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26447685 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26447685 2. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25565328 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25565328

joering2 10y ago
Slim chances. I'm sorry to say that but most cancer research you hear of in media don't want to cure cancer. Its just a business. Otherwise Apple could throw 40 billions of $ in it and come up wit ha cure. At least in USA, it become such a fat cow to milk that foundations grew everywhere out of nowhere... go to your local store and say "no thank you" when cashier ask you "would you like to donate to fight cancer" and see their look like you are a murderer or something. Its next to "charity" best way for crooks to get rich tax-free while sucking on unaware populus.
- JakeAl 10y ago
  There are plenty of cures for cancer. They just don't all work all of the time on all people and it's not necessarily permanent. It all depends on the type of cancer and what the cause is. You can get the cancer in any cell in your body and often you have more than one type at a time. Plus the treatment for preventing a recurrence can be just as unhealthy as the disease. That's why there can be so many variations in treatment and survival rates. The biggest thing you are trying to stay ahead of is the cancer spreading to your lymph nodes which is where the anti-bodies and white blood cells that power your immune system are made. Crippling these makes you susceptible to other diseases like every day bacterial infections and viruses which then could end up killing you. It's certainly not because they don't want to cure cancer. Most cancers (80%) can be prevented though, and 70% of them are associated with HPV, a virus that is transmitted through sex. This is why sleeping around is unhealthy. You could be spreading it to every one you sleep with orally as well as genitally. (just another reason marrying your first love and being monogamous is healthy behavior). HPV has been associated with cervical cancer, breast cancer, throat cancer, prostate cancer, mouth cancer (noticing the pattern...). And that's just one factor associated with cancer. Eating healthy (fruits an dveggies, lower red meat especially meat treated with chemicals) reduces other types of cancers associated with your digestive system like colon cancer (and is good for the heart and circulatory system which starts affecting you the closer you get to 50). Basically your arteries harden and your circulation gets poorer as you age and that results in other problems that creep up like high or low blood pressure that causes things like chronic headaches or numb feet, being overweight which can also lead to diabetes, etc. If you take care of yourself when you are young you will have fewer problems as you age, but they are inevitable the older you get. But sometimes cancer is just a genetic mutation you inherited and you will get it anyway.

brute 10y ago

> "The figures are even worse in the UK. According to Cancer Research UK, 54% of men and 48% of women will get cancer at some point in their lives." I am not sure if this is a good or a bad thing. If you accept that cancer is simply the disease you get when you live long enough and don't die because of anything else before (a view even supported by the article), a higher percentage could also mean that all other things are in control now, and only cancer and heart attacks are left.

brianwawok 10y ago
So we hear about how eating healthy and exercise and yada yada help your cancer and heart attack risks. How much would each go down if we were perfect? My gut feeling is we could fix 75% of current heart attacks with weight control + exercise + whatever, but only say 25% of cancer... i.e. that heart attacks are very much in the group of things we know how to fix, whereas cancer is still very much in the group of things we don't know how to fix. But curious what the real numbers are...
- dota_fanatic 10y ago
  Well, I suspect many things regarding health are outside of anyone's control. Ie. if you're a living organism in 2016 on planet Earth, then you probably are negatively affected due to pollution caused by humans, let individuals hope they're lucky. There's lot of nasty stuff out there that we've made and let loose on purpose or by accident. You can't have an ideally healthy lifestyle when all up and down the ecological chain our handiwork is present (people like to make money with the least amount of effort on their part).
- agumonkey 10y ago
  How prevalent is cancer amongst regular sport fans ?
hutzlibu 10y ago
> all other things are in control now, and only cancer and heart attacks are left. Really? What about parkinson etc?

Kip9000 10y ago

What if cancer is the evolution in action. Evolution has to go through a huge number of permutations to get a viable macro organism. By trying to cure cancer, we are trying to withhold the natural selection in some form and preventing the next stage of evolution.

eru 10y ago
There is no such thing as `next stage of evolution'. Evolution doesn't have stages. Also, we are only interested in curing cancer in humans (and perhaps at most livestock). Wild animals will still get cancer. (Do plants and funghi etc get cancer?)
- Kip9000 10y ago
  Humans evolution can be characterised into major stages from ape to homosapien.
  - quonn 10y ago
    No it can't. There were only many small adaptions, not stages. Stages also suggests that there is a next stage to evolve to which is not correct.
    - Kip9000 10y ago
      You are conflating 'evolution is directionless' with 'no stages'. Stages can only be seen when looking back at the evolutionary history. For example: Study reveals human body has gone through four stages of evolution (http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-08/bu-srh083115.php http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-08/bu-srh083115....) http://www.pnas.org/content/112/37/11524.abstract http://www.pnas.org/content/112/37/11524.abstract
      - eru 10y ago
        Stages are a human abstraction that help us understand and make sense.

ekianjo 10y ago

All this talk about tobacco but nothing about alcohol, for which there is much stronger evidence of DNA damage? Does the BBC have a hidden conflict of interest?

lunula 10y ago
Do you have a link supporting the DNA damage and alcohol relationship? That's interesting. Lung cancers are particular in that they feature an incredible amount of somatic mutation. If I remember its at least 10x as much as the next high-mutation rate cancer. Probably more even. Smoking tobacco provides a melange of mutagens: complex aromatic DNA adducts that result from combustion, heavy oils, and radiation from potassium heavy fertilizer. These would be enough to cause problems alone, but to make things as bad as possible the active ingredient is a critical signaling molecule in the cell cycle, which after copious application is likely to induce the survival of cells unresponsive to it. These cells are less likely to play nice with others.
- fsloth 10y ago
  "Do you have a link supporting the DNA damage and alcohol relationship? That's interesting." Not the op but alcoholics are likelier to develop e.g. pancreatic cancer. I believe the direct mechanism, though, is not explained. "About 7 out of 10 cases of chronic pancreatitis are due to long term heavy drinking": http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/type/pancreatic-cancer/about/pancreatic-cancer-risks-and-causes http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/type/pancreatic...

noam87 10y ago

> But a more telling reason for the rise is that humans, on average, live a lot longer than they used to. "If you live long enough you will get cancer," says Biankin. I keep hearing this, but do we have data that shows that cancer rates have not changed within age groups? Average lifespan is skewed by much higher infant mortality rates of the past: an average lifespan of 45 doesn't mean everybody was dropping dead at 45; it means more people were dying during their infancy and youth.

maxerickson 10y ago
A 20 year old roman could expect to live to ~50: http://www.richardcarrier.info/lifetbl.html http://www.richardcarrier.info/lifetbl.html In the US in 1900, a 20 year old could expect to live to ~62: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html Today, a 20 year old can expect to make it to about 80. So the gains aren't really limited to infant and child mortality. A substantial portion of the gain has certainly come from improvements there though.
- LionessLover 10y ago
  But the gains at age may come from other areas and not from medicine. In this talk http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/return-of-the-microbes-how-infections-are-once-more-taking-over http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/return-of-the-m... the professor mentions as an aside (there is a transcript of the talk) > And what is interesting, if you take out the childhood mortality, the Victorian person between 1850 and 1880 lived slightly longer, if he was a male, than you do today. Females had the risk if child birth, an area where medicine did do a lot. It shows that sanitation/hygiene and food seem to have done a lot for lower mortality outside the risk factors of being very young and/or giving birth. And that was before antibiotics! Which is nice to know when we get another doom article about the end of antibiotics, because it seems that while sure individuals will suffer it by no means warrants predictions of doom for mankind.

msdos 10y ago

In the US, the lifetime risk of developing cancer is 42% in men and 38% in women Woah, this isn't far from saying living in the US isn't far from a coin toss for a death sentence.

smt88 10y ago
Not if you don't smoke. Smoking accounts for ~30% of cancer deaths in the US. A substantial number of the rest are due to skin cancer (lots of white people descended from Northern Europeans living in sunny climates).
sgift 10y ago
Luckily, cancer isn't a death sentence anymore. It is really, really shitty. REALLY shitty. But it is not a certain death sentence.
whamlastxmas 10y ago
There are lots of types of cancers. Some of the most common types (skin and prostate) aren't really much of a detriment to life expectancy.
- msdos 10y ago
  This explains it. Thanks.

sandworm101 10y ago

One has to wonder why we age in the first place. No doubt we have evolved to age because a species that does not die off cannot evolve. The advantages of living longer eventually are outweighed by the pressure to evolve more rapidly. So if we see age as an evolved trait, might cancer be part of that endgame? Or at least, our growing susceptibility to cancer and other diseases as we age evolved specifically to kill off the old so as to make room for new generations. This of course would have evolved long long ago, back before we were mammals. As only a handful of the most primitive animals are essentially immortal (jellyfish and the like) this would seem a very successful evolutionary trait.

Ericson2314 10y ago
Why the downvotes? There are other articles (on HN recently!) that postulate that aging is evolved. Now yes cancer itself, as mutation caused, can't really be a trait of the host (I go as far as to consider cancer cells a separate parasitic species). And since many cancers are immortal, and the aging relates to a secession of cell division in some sense they are opposite extremes with normal development in the middle. But in being opposites they are related---end games / limitation for multicellularity.

astazangasta 10y ago

While Swanton's work is great in revealing how difficult it is to contain a tumor and how evolution allows escape from therapy and in exposing genetic diversity in tumors, the idea that you can "chop at the root of the tree" is (in my opinion) bunkum. First of all, even if you target trunk mutations you can evolve resistance. Second, you can't just keep loading up drugs into patients; they can often barely tolerate one of these therapies (which have off-target effects on normal cells), combination therapies compound the problem.

fiatmoney 10y ago

The most horrifying story I know of is canine transmissible venereal cancer. It used to be a dog, but was more evolutionarily successful evolving into a tumor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canine_transmissible_venereal_tumor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canine_transmissible_venereal_...

ashitlerferad 10y ago
The Tasmanian Devil facial cancer is another horrific transmissible cancer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumor_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumor_disease
Ericson2314 10y ago
Good thing it seems not too lethal?
- lostlogin 10y ago
  It seems fairly debilitating in late stages. The Tasmanian devil's one seems to be threatening the species, which is rather serious.
  - Ericson2314 10y ago
    Yeah I mean as horrifying as "std cancer" is, "species-threatening cancer" is objectively worse.
austinjp 10y ago
"It used to be a dog" is a truly provocative phrase, not in a bad way. Fascinating.

more_original 10y ago

This reminds me of this culture of cancer cells from a woman who died from cancer in the 50s. The cancer is still alive in laboratories today and there were even proposals to classify it as a new species: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa

saiya-jin 10y ago
ex-gf was working with "her" cells some 6-8 years ago while researching some rare type of anemia, back in Prague. Didn't know it's actually used worldwide. one way to become immortal in some sense :)
- masklinn 10y ago
  That is the name of Rebecca Skloot's excellent book on the subject: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal_Life_of_Henrietta_Lacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal_Life_of_Henrietta...)

tokenadult 10y ago

From the article: "In the US there has been a 25% decline in death rate in the last two decades. 'More than half of that decline is driven by cancer prevention activities," says Brawley. "This points to the fact that some of the cancers that would previously have killed people had been prevented. Almost a third of death from cancer in the US has been attributed to cigarette smoking, for example. This makes tobacco "the single most preventable cause of death in the world", according to Cancer Research UK." Never starting a smoking habit, or quitting a smoking habit if you have already started, is a great way to prevent a lot cancer risk. Being moderate (not excessive) in alcohol use helps a lot too. http://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention http://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention

albrtpro 10y ago

The sad truth is above 80% of the food you can find in a U.S. supermarket is transgenic or otherwise called GMO. All sorts of carbohydrate sources - which comprise a huge part of the U.S. diet - from cereals, refined sugars and the base of the american diet: corn fructose. Vegetables and meat that's been grown with also GMO feed has been genetically modified and released to the public without enough testing. One of the consequences is cancer. Cancer grows because the quality of your food, the biotechnology embedded in it and american eating habits are incredibly unhealthy and unsuited for its lifestyle. Research the lobbying between FDA and Monsanto, research the correlation between meat consumption and risk of heart disease and cancer, research the recommended daily intake of fibre and compare it to the average american diet, see the correlation with cancer. There lies the answer. This article is a lie. Monopolies ALWAYS create complexity (Zero to One - Peter Thiel). Here are what your typical bullshitting articles say: - Cancer is a living entity, like a virus. - Cancer is way more complex than we thought! - Cancer keeps growing and it's unstoppable - We still don't know how cancer is created Start here: https://nutritionfacts.org https://nutritionfacts.org I lived this on my own skin with my mum getting cancer. This article has been completely lobbied by the pharmaceutical industry. No doubt.

jrlocke 10y ago
There is certainly no scientific consensus that GMO/transgenic food causes cancer; if anything the community believes it does not. Perhaps we currently have flaws in implementation (e.g., Roundup-ready crops could lead to increased human exposure to the herbicide), but why is GMO itself a problem? Adding genes from harmless cold water fish to harmless standard tomatoes in order to produce cold resistant tomatoes, for example, seems to be a safe procedure. I would love to be pointed to credible studies that contradict my way of thinking about this.
- albrtpro 10y ago
  You are right about consensus. But I invite you to investigate how big the cancer industry is in worth/year and historically how it all has been created, and who owns it. Also to study the history of the American food industrialisation. Also to investigate who owns and influences the top media sources in the world. To be clear the point I was trying to make wasn't "GMO is the only cause of cancer" or "Genetical modifications on foods produce cancer". My point is "Current GMO products consumption is one of the contributors to cancer" - I'm not stating how, I'm stating that it has an effect. I know far more about the effects of meat and dairy than I do about GMO. But somewhere to get started would be here: http://nutritionfacts.org/video/are-gmos-safe-the-case-of-roundup-ready-soy/ http://nutritionfacts.org/video/are-gmos-safe-the-case-of-ro... (The page has links to all the scientific sources cited)