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Erm. This is a terrible argument. The universe is logical. Each cell in the human body is at its core just a very complex state machine. What we call cancer i

Erm. This is a terrible argument. The universe is logical. Each cell in the human body is at its core just a very complex state machine. What we call cancer is just a particular state for a cell, and its descendents. Find a way to change the cell state, we end cancer. And we know we can change a cell state-we can transform skin cells into stem cells, so what would make it impossible to turn cancerous cells into non-cancerous cells? We just haven't found out the proper way to do so. It takes data, and simulation, and lots of time. At some point we'll figure it out. I think the only misguided attempts are chemotherapy-based - damaging cells indiscriminately, just because cancer cells multiply faster and thus accumulate dna damage faster and thus die faster than normal cells. This means that unless you kill all the cancerous cells your cancer will come back. The problem is chemotherapy drugs will also be damaging your body in other ways, depressing your immune system, and thus making it easier for any remaining cancerous cell to start it all over again. I believe it's much easier to simply figure out the right cocktail that would change cancerous cells into normal cells again, and then find the delivery mechanism for that. I can see a future where we can transform cancerous cells into cancer-killing cells (let's say T/B Cells) that would just cascade into the complete eradication of cancerous cells within an organism. This guy's argument boils down to lack of imagination.

hprotagonist 10y ago
Ever done any wet lab research?
Palomides 10y ago
cancer isn't a particular state, except in the vaguest sense of 'continually multiplying, but like, in a bad way'. any person's cancer is millions/billions of semi-independent, extremely complicated, poorly understood state machines, with a variety of mutations, constantly interacting and evolving against any treatments applied and immune reactions. imho, cancer is a fundamental disease/property of multicellular life, and trivial reductionist perspectives completely out of touch.
- abecedarius 10y ago
  In principle it shouldn't matter that cancer is not well defined, if health is well defined. "Just" visit every single cell and repair its gene sequence to your body's consensus sequence, and similarly for the epigenetic state to the extent necessary -- the latter requires more knowledge to do correctly, but otoh seems less crucial. This is of course ridiculously ambitious compared to the current state of the art, but I think it's a reasonable start to countering the claim that a general cure for cancer is impossible in principle.
  - Palomides 10y ago
    A cell /is/ epigenetic state, and the effect of any piece of DNA is profoundly controlled by other pieces of DNA, RNA, proteins, RNAs interacting with RNAs, RNAs interacting with proteins, proteins interacting with proteins, etc. Scrubbing the proteins, RNA, and so forth from a cell without killing it is inconceivable. That said, I don't want to say that cancer is fundamentally beyond us. I think cheap sequencing and emerging highly targeted DNA editing systems, along with better understanding of the immune response to cancer, will get us most of the way there in a practical sense.
    - abecedarius 10y ago
      Repairs of all these things are performed by the cell itself without killing itself, so they're surely physically possible. But they're limited by a lack of outside information -- e.g. if the DNA is too corrupt, the repair processes can't check the uncorrupted DNA of other cells. That could be fixed with advanced enough technology.
      - Palomides 10y ago
        killing the cell is actually not a big deal, any given cell is generally replaceable. What you suggest is more or less what I mention; you could, say, try to add back some genetic machinery for the cancer cells to recognize that they're defective, and then they kill themselves. Or help the higher level repair mechanism (the immune system) target cancer cells. To my understanding, trying to fix anything at the level between whole cell and DNA mutation is much harder.
idlewords 10y ago
You just solved cancer from first principles on a message board. Congratulations!
maxerickson 10y ago
Why is it misguided to do things that are known to be effective? I think for people with cancer right now, waiting for magic would be a lot more misguided than chemotherapy.
- Operyl 10y ago
  There's some days during my treatment that I'd almost be tempted to. Chemotherapy is rough :(
  - genkaos 10y ago
    Stay strong!
tyingq 10y ago
He does spell out why he doesn't subscribe to that approach: "Cancer cells are not simply a disorder or breakdown in a mechanism, but an organism going on a full-tilt offensive, using multiple, often shifting strategies to produce and use molecular fuel, win resources, and evade the immune system. If so, then the rules of the game may change—these insights suggest that the war on cancer may be endless." I don't have any expertise here, so I'm not saying he's right or wrong. But it doesn't seem to be a lack of imagination.
atomicthumbs 10y ago
thank you for warning me in advance about your terrible argument
nabla9 10y ago
I don't think you understood his cancer is ecologic, not systemic argument correctly.
goatlover 10y ago
>> The universe is logical. Each cell in the human body is at its core just a very complex state machine. So the universe is just math, basically? Or maybe a computer program?
ue_ 10y ago
>The universe is logical. How so? >at its core just a very complex state machine Why do you say that?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
prashnts 10y ago
Chaotic, unpredictable behaviours can emerge when simpler, predictable elements are brought together. A double pendulum is a good example of this. Agreed that we don't yet know how to regulate the apoptosis, or understand how metastasis works. DNA Methylation, small RNA regulation, and purpose of non-coding RNA isn't very well understood yet, too. > I believe it's much easier to simply figure out the right cocktail that would change cancerous cells into normal cells again, and then find the delivery mechanism for that. I reckon much of this has to do with small RNA and miRNA based regulation of transcription. Essentially the specific portions of the RNA/DNA are "silenced" by several regulatory factors. If a growth regulator gene, say CDKNA is accidentally silenced then the cell would undergo an uncontrolled growth, _with_ mutations. This in turn will grow "diseased" cells, eventually causing cancer. Trouble is, we just do not understand this properly, yet.
- obstinate 10y ago
  Double and triple pendulums have been solved: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyN-CRNrb3E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyN-CRNrb3E I have little doubt cancer will be someday as well. It might not -- probably won't -- happen in my lifetime. But if humanity hasn't collapsed, I find it very unlikely that we're still dealing with cancer in a thousand years.
mrestko 10y ago
The author does not lack imagination. You may, however, lack knowledge of biology. What you're boiling down to a "cell state" represents dysregulation of the most complex object in the known universe. A single human cell is vastly more complicated than anything made by mankind.
- JabavuAdams 10y ago
  I agree with your point, but am always a bit put off by these "most complex ... in the known universe." It's something that people say that doesn't really hold up to cursory scrutiny. E.g. we think of stars as big balls of fusing matter. But that's an idealisation. Is a star really less complex than a human body? It all depends on which questions we want to answer. So there's an asymmetry in this argument. Take a thing that we're trying to understand down to the finest detail, and compare it to a caricature of some other thing that we're not trying to understand at such a fine resolution.
  - dwaltrip 10y ago
    A common measure of complexity is the amount of information required to fully describe or recreate some system. If you simply gather a very large number of hydrogen atoms into a region of space at a certain density, you will create star. From this angle, it isn't terribly complex. The instructions for creating a cell from scratch are... immensely more complicated. The star's behavior, .e.g. the movement and changes of the convection zones, fusion dynamics, how the magnetic fields change over time, coronal mass ejections, sunspots, etc. may be extremely complex. I think few people who know much about stars would disagree on that. But I would wager there are many more orders of magnitude of complexity going on in a human cell, from an information theory perspective. Even just describing individual proteins themselves and how they fold is phenomenally difficult. Of course, I may be wrong about the cell's behavior having higher complexity. The important take away is that it is possible to make such comparisons in a meaningful way.
    - JabavuAdams 10y ago
      Good points, but there's still something missing in the comparison. It's the difference between the initial information content, and the dynamics. Suppose we had to fix some problem in a star such that we need to precisely manipulate the magnetic fields, and perhaps things at a quantum scale. At that point, we are concerned with the fine-scale configuration of that particular star. Your proposed star creation algorithm only gives an ensemble over all stars of that particular mass and initial composition. It has less information content, because it doesn't create a particular star. I.e. we are willing to accept a huge class of individuals that we call "stars". So, we're back to comparing thing A that we need to understand at the finest scale, to thing B where we ignore its individual complexity in favour of the stereotypical version. It's easy to estimate the gravitational attraction or mass of a cell. It's this fine-scale manipulation that causes these severe requirements for deep understanding. EDIT> :) The instructions for creating life are even simpler. 1) Have a Big Bang. 2) Wait.
mannykannot 10y ago
I suppose that by 'just', you mean 'can be reduced to', but 'just' also implies there is not much to it, which is definitely not the case here. More concretely, the combinatorial complexity of the state-machine approach makes it infeasible.
hprotagonist 10y ago
>The universe is logical. Each cell in the human body is at its core just a very complex state machine. Even if determinism holds (and, spoiler alert from about 1927, it doesn't), you can't avoid chaos. Lorenz found that out and defined Chaos: where the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future. I assure you, biological systems exhibit all the hallmarks of (possibly) deterministic mathematical chaos.

hprotagonist 10y ago

Ever done any wet lab research?

Palomides 10y ago

cancer isn't a particular state, except in the vaguest sense of 'continually multiplying, but like, in a bad way'. any person's cancer is millions/billions of semi-independent, extremely complicated, poorly understood state machines, with a variety of mutations, constantly interacting and evolving against any treatments applied and immune reactions. imho, cancer is a fundamental disease/property of multicellular life, and trivial reductionist perspectives completely out of touch.

abecedarius 10y ago
In principle it shouldn't matter that cancer is not well defined, if health is well defined. "Just" visit every single cell and repair its gene sequence to your body's consensus sequence, and similarly for the epigenetic state to the extent necessary -- the latter requires more knowledge to do correctly, but otoh seems less crucial. This is of course ridiculously ambitious compared to the current state of the art, but I think it's a reasonable start to countering the claim that a general cure for cancer is impossible in principle.
- Palomides 10y ago
  A cell /is/ epigenetic state, and the effect of any piece of DNA is profoundly controlled by other pieces of DNA, RNA, proteins, RNAs interacting with RNAs, RNAs interacting with proteins, proteins interacting with proteins, etc. Scrubbing the proteins, RNA, and so forth from a cell without killing it is inconceivable. That said, I don't want to say that cancer is fundamentally beyond us. I think cheap sequencing and emerging highly targeted DNA editing systems, along with better understanding of the immune response to cancer, will get us most of the way there in a practical sense.
  - abecedarius 10y ago
    Repairs of all these things are performed by the cell itself without killing itself, so they're surely physically possible. But they're limited by a lack of outside information -- e.g. if the DNA is too corrupt, the repair processes can't check the uncorrupted DNA of other cells. That could be fixed with advanced enough technology.
    - Palomides 10y ago
      killing the cell is actually not a big deal, any given cell is generally replaceable. What you suggest is more or less what I mention; you could, say, try to add back some genetic machinery for the cancer cells to recognize that they're defective, and then they kill themselves. Or help the higher level repair mechanism (the immune system) target cancer cells. To my understanding, trying to fix anything at the level between whole cell and DNA mutation is much harder.

idlewords 10y ago

You just solved cancer from first principles on a message board. Congratulations!

maxerickson 10y ago

Why is it misguided to do things that are known to be effective? I think for people with cancer right now, waiting for magic would be a lot more misguided than chemotherapy.

Operyl 10y ago
There's some days during my treatment that I'd almost be tempted to. Chemotherapy is rough :(
- genkaos 10y ago
  Stay strong!

tyingq 10y ago

He does spell out why he doesn't subscribe to that approach: "Cancer cells are not simply a disorder or breakdown in a mechanism, but an organism going on a full-tilt offensive, using multiple, often shifting strategies to produce and use molecular fuel, win resources, and evade the immune system. If so, then the rules of the game may change—these insights suggest that the war on cancer may be endless." I don't have any expertise here, so I'm not saying he's right or wrong. But it doesn't seem to be a lack of imagination.

atomicthumbs 10y ago

thank you for warning me in advance about your terrible argument

nabla9 10y ago

I don't think you understood his cancer is ecologic, not systemic argument correctly.

goatlover 10y ago

>> The universe is logical. Each cell in the human body is at its core just a very complex state machine. So the universe is just math, basically? Or maybe a computer program?

ue_ 10y ago

>The universe is logical. How so? >at its core just a very complex state machine Why do you say that?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

prashnts 10y ago

Chaotic, unpredictable behaviours can emerge when simpler, predictable elements are brought together. A double pendulum is a good example of this. Agreed that we don't yet know how to regulate the apoptosis, or understand how metastasis works. DNA Methylation, small RNA regulation, and purpose of non-coding RNA isn't very well understood yet, too. > I believe it's much easier to simply figure out the right cocktail that would change cancerous cells into normal cells again, and then find the delivery mechanism for that. I reckon much of this has to do with small RNA and miRNA based regulation of transcription. Essentially the specific portions of the RNA/DNA are "silenced" by several regulatory factors. If a growth regulator gene, say CDKNA is accidentally silenced then the cell would undergo an uncontrolled growth, _with_ mutations. This in turn will grow "diseased" cells, eventually causing cancer. Trouble is, we just do not understand this properly, yet.

obstinate 10y ago
Double and triple pendulums have been solved: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyN-CRNrb3E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyN-CRNrb3E I have little doubt cancer will be someday as well. It might not -- probably won't -- happen in my lifetime. But if humanity hasn't collapsed, I find it very unlikely that we're still dealing with cancer in a thousand years.

mrestko 10y ago

The author does not lack imagination. You may, however, lack knowledge of biology. What you're boiling down to a "cell state" represents dysregulation of the most complex object in the known universe. A single human cell is vastly more complicated than anything made by mankind.

JabavuAdams 10y ago
I agree with your point, but am always a bit put off by these "most complex ... in the known universe." It's something that people say that doesn't really hold up to cursory scrutiny. E.g. we think of stars as big balls of fusing matter. But that's an idealisation. Is a star really less complex than a human body? It all depends on which questions we want to answer. So there's an asymmetry in this argument. Take a thing that we're trying to understand down to the finest detail, and compare it to a caricature of some other thing that we're not trying to understand at such a fine resolution.
- dwaltrip 10y ago
  A common measure of complexity is the amount of information required to fully describe or recreate some system. If you simply gather a very large number of hydrogen atoms into a region of space at a certain density, you will create star. From this angle, it isn't terribly complex. The instructions for creating a cell from scratch are... immensely more complicated. The star's behavior, .e.g. the movement and changes of the convection zones, fusion dynamics, how the magnetic fields change over time, coronal mass ejections, sunspots, etc. may be extremely complex. I think few people who know much about stars would disagree on that. But I would wager there are many more orders of magnitude of complexity going on in a human cell, from an information theory perspective. Even just describing individual proteins themselves and how they fold is phenomenally difficult. Of course, I may be wrong about the cell's behavior having higher complexity. The important take away is that it is possible to make such comparisons in a meaningful way.
  - JabavuAdams 10y ago
    Good points, but there's still something missing in the comparison. It's the difference between the initial information content, and the dynamics. Suppose we had to fix some problem in a star such that we need to precisely manipulate the magnetic fields, and perhaps things at a quantum scale. At that point, we are concerned with the fine-scale configuration of that particular star. Your proposed star creation algorithm only gives an ensemble over all stars of that particular mass and initial composition. It has less information content, because it doesn't create a particular star. I.e. we are willing to accept a huge class of individuals that we call "stars". So, we're back to comparing thing A that we need to understand at the finest scale, to thing B where we ignore its individual complexity in favour of the stereotypical version. It's easy to estimate the gravitational attraction or mass of a cell. It's this fine-scale manipulation that causes these severe requirements for deep understanding. EDIT> :) The instructions for creating life are even simpler. 1) Have a Big Bang. 2) Wait.

mannykannot 10y ago

I suppose that by 'just', you mean 'can be reduced to', but 'just' also implies there is not much to it, which is definitely not the case here. More concretely, the combinatorial complexity of the state-machine approach makes it infeasible.

hprotagonist 10y ago

>The universe is logical. Each cell in the human body is at its core just a very complex state machine. Even if determinism holds (and, spoiler alert from about 1927, it doesn't), you can't avoid chaos. Lorenz found that out and defined Chaos: where the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future. I assure you, biological systems exhibit all the hallmarks of (possibly) deterministic mathematical chaos.