8 ms·

Before cancer kills, it cheats

198 points by chmaynard 9y ago

untilHellbanned 9y ago
Professor at a med school here. Regardless of whether you think the specifics presented in this article (e.g., NSAIDS-esophageal cancer) are right, it’s great to see this kind of philosophical approach to biomedical research. We need more people like this professor. That she started with a plant and that made her think about humans was a great insight. She rightly recognizes the key role of cell autonomous vs. cell non-autonomous processes in how multicellular organisms work. That she is a woman and someone not at an Ivy League school is also very refreshing to see getting publicized by Harvard. There are so many great scientists aground the world doing great stuff. Let’s keep finding them and reporting on them! Please media, more of these types of stories and less clickbait please! I loved this article. My faith in humanity was restored just a touch here.
- Normal_gaussian 9y ago
  The irony is, we are very likely to have been baited here. Playing devils advocate: * Started with a plant -> thought about humans. Great insight or actively encouraged progression of research? Research that isn't about humans and their immediate crisis' is less valuable so receives less funding, to try and relate your research to humans is to pursue a primary incentive. Sounds a bit like the ever more fictional founding stories. * Rightly recognising cell autonomous vs non-autonomous processes. I'm not a biologist - but this sounds like something every leading biologist should recognise? * She is a woman. Presumably she didn't do this research alone, so there is an iceberg of people we aren't seeing. Looking back I don't think the Harvard Gazette is starved for things to write about, so there may in fact be selection bias towards women being shown over men - its politically favourable at the moment. * Not from an Ivy-League school being publicised by Harvard. Harvard slaps its name next to other people's research, promoting the superiority of its brand in giving handouts to sub-par institutions. I don't know how to play devils advocate on the philosophical approach; I'm biased - glad to see research in the upper echelons of biological research which considers the stoic approach.
- klmr 9y ago
  > 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 human biologist) has read. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a well-written article explaining the biology to a lay audience. But it doesn’t hold any striking new insights. All of this is not merely known but in fact fundamental knowledge. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hallmarks_of_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hallmarks_of_Cancer
  - iak8god 9y ago
    > Don’t get me wrong: it’s a well-written article explaining the biology to a lay audience. But it doesn’t hold any striking new insights. This "article" in the Harvard Gazette is basically a press release about an invited lecture that happened at Harvard. If it manages to clearly and correctly explain any science, then it's already going above and beyond its main purpose. Edit: * Here is Athena Aktipis' lab site: http://www.aktipislab.org http://www.aktipislab.org * Here is a 2015 NYT article about her work that goes into more detail than this press release: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/28/science/cellular-cheaters-give-rise-to-cancer.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/28/science/cellular-cheaters... * This is the scientific article: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/370/1673/20140219 http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/370/1673/2014...
  - tcj_phx 9y ago
    > 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 is similar to how the use of bloodletting persisted for hundreds of years [0], in spite of the low rates of success. [0] http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/theodoric-of-york/n8661?snl=1 http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/theodoric-of-yo... There's no need for new insights, the old insight needs to be fully developed. Your link has a subsection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hallmarks_of_Cancer#Deregulated_metabolism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hallmarks_of_Cancer#Deregu... Warburg's nobel prize was in 1931; we're finally realizing he was probably right all along. (minor edit)
- fastball 9y ago
  That she is a woman... publicity from Harvard I'd hate to break this to you, but that's definitely not surprising behavior from Harvard of all places. I mean, we're talking about the same Harvard, right?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- inteleng 9y ago
  I find this comment extremely sexist.
  - jtbayly 9y ago
    I find this comment to be devoid of reason.
homero 9y ago
A future where cancer is controlled but not cured is just as good and might be easier to achieve. I hope science gets there before I get cancer which is inevitable, unless I die from a heart attack.
- agumonkey 9y ago
  Methinks future lies in between. Many people say that we all have cancer, at different scales and different reach. So just avoiding massive tumors and metastasis is probable the goal.
- jcims 9y ago
  Agreed. My wife is going through this now, and the primary issue is the uncertainty around it all. Nobody can tell her what her future holds, just that there's a very high likelihood that 'success' will be fleeting and this won't be our last series of chemo. I may be misunderstanding what the author proposes, but if the threat of cancer was reduced to the physiological impacts of dormant tumors, I'm pretty sure we would consider that a win.
  - spyspy 9y ago
    Always relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/931/ https://xkcd.com/931/ really helped visualize for me what going through cancer treatment is like. God speed.
    - jcims 9y ago
      This pretty much nails it. Thank you.
- gjm11 9y ago
  Look on the bright side: You might get hit by a bus instead.
- pnutjam 9y ago
  So cancer will only kill poor Americans?
domnomnom 9y ago
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 these days). My favorite is OpenBSD, they invent the cybersecurity. They were one of the first to implement address randomization for kernel and library loading. This is actually strikingly similar to what goes on with the genome with retrotransposons during early embryology stages. People really like to repeatmask (aka SINE/introns) genomes because it makes BLAST go faster. Ironically, arithmetic/statistical compression algorithms work really well with repeats (I don’t think this compressed state can be examined, but compression algorithms are seriously under appreciated).
- smallhands 9y ago
  I have no idea what the heck you are talking about but is human biology have computation at the core?
- smallhands 9y ago
  I have no idea what you are talking about but does human biology have computation at the core? Any papers on these?
  - thraway180306 9y ago
    biology have computation at the core? Doubtful. You can to computing with DNA http://dna.caltech.edu http://dna.caltech.edu but it is still debated if the actual role of DNA is being a code (some recently weasel out form that stance by saying it's an “app”, like there's a difference, machine code being a code). Coding theory applied to DNA yields inconclusive results. Galois theory usually has power over any kind of information encoding, cryptographic, computable or not. One constructed one for DNA convinced mathematicians it's not the way to go at all. If it's computation it's nothing like what we mean by any model computation, you may as well say it's magic instead of making stretched analogies. About OpenBSD and evolution, that's so fetch... these folk invented the attack in the first place, not evolved a response to some market force in the early oughties. Broadly I don't think designed systems are in business of evolving, otherwise living organisms could perhaps evolved electro-hydrostatic instead of hydraulic power system with a pump being a single point of failure.
wgerard 9y ago
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 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 experiment I assisted with was basically putting them all together at differing ratios and seeing what happened over time - the different systems released different fluorescent proteins, so we could measure their relative populations. Common sense might dictate that the cheaters would rapidly outgrow the cooperators and eventually crash the whole system, but that actually didn't happen until very high ratios of cheaters. The cooperative yeast systems somehow managed to extinguish the cheaters pretty consistently (all the experiments were repeated and done in triplicate). This happened even at fairly absurd ratios like 3:1 cheaters:cooperators. Unfortunately, I left before any of the follow-up work to determine why that was happening. All that to say, it's fascinating how much cooperative systems really are favored in nature. Glad to see someone explicitly applying this idea to cancer.
- QML 9y ago
  Your post kind of reminds of two other articles along the same concept: [1] http://ncase.me/trust/ http://ncase.me/trust/ [2] https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-to-triumph-and-cooperate-in-game-theory-and-evolution-20171109/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-to-triumph-and-cooperate-...
- sytelus 9y ago
  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.
mikepetroff 9y ago
A video of her full talk is available here: https://www.facebook.com/harvardmuseumsofscienceandculture/videos/815475351995720/ https://www.facebook.com/harvardmuseumsofscienceandculture/v...
- fredsted 9y ago
  Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLgvdS3VEQk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLgvdS3VEQk
danharaj 9y ago
> This is what cancer cells do: Proliferate without limit, avoid cell death, monopolize resources, co-opt the labor of other cells, and destroy the surrounding environment. Rings a bell
- gshubert17 9y ago
  Agreed. What can society, which creates corporations, do to limit the likelihood that they will "go rogue" to harm society?
  - lotsofpulp 9y ago
    I think the person you are responding to is alluding to humans, not corporations.
    - danharaj 9y ago
      Only under certain circumstances. It's not inevitable that we be this way. Our most powerful societies cultivate a condition where our economic activity is this way.
  - wobbly99 9y ago
    Regulate them, limit them and in extreme cases kill them. And the thought that corporations are cancers of human societies that cheat is not a new.
    - 2chen 9y ago
      Corporations are more multicellular organisms than cancer. They are capable of achieving far more than a single cell or person, for better or for worse.
- breckinloggins 9y ago
  I was thinking the same thing. Those locust plagues are hugely devastating... Thinking beyond the snark for a bit, though, locusts might be an example of a species-level cancer cheating the “rules” of a habitat. Humans? We just throw the rules away altogether and have historically written new ones that only apply to us. The difference between us and locusts, though, is that many of us fight back against our own short term interests and argue “hey, we’re a tumor right now. We should consider not being one of those.”
bhickey 9y ago
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 heterogenous setting all bets are off. Cheater mutants have been widely observed and fall into two categories: obligatory and opportunistic cheaters. The obligatory cheaters refuse to participate in the stalk, while the opportunistic cheats preferentially segregate themselves into the fruit. It's easy to see how these behaviors might be beneficial. There's a double edge to obligatory cheating, though: in they cannot undergo sporulation.
- AllegedAlec 9y ago
  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 http://www.pnas.org/content/98/7/3879
aszantu 9y ago
https://ketogeek.com/blogs/news/episode-20-dr-thomas-seyfried https://ketogeek.com/blogs/news/episode-20-dr-thomas-seyfrie... coincidentally listening to that right now
wcr3 9y ago
trying to read around wtv font they used feels like my field of vision's being drawn and quartered.
artsnail 9y ago
How accurate is the comparison with plant fasciation, for anyone who knows more? My experience with owning/growing fasciated succulents (usually referred to as "crested" by growers and collectors) has been that they're more challenging to grow in terms of risks of things like overwatering, but as far as I know that behavior doesn't necessarily impact their overall lifespan. Sometimes a crested specimen can also revert back to normal growth. Maybe that's tangential to the article itself, but it's something I'd be curious to find more information about.

198 points by chmaynard 9y ago

Professor at a med school here. Regardless of whether you think the specifics presented in this article (e.g., NSAIDS-esophageal cancer) are right, it’s great to see this kind of philosophical approach to biomedical research. We need more people like this professor. That she started with a plant and that made her think about humans was a great insight. She rightly recognizes the key role of cell autonomous vs. cell non-autonomous processes in how multicellular organisms work. That she is a woman and someone not at an Ivy League school is also very refreshing to see getting publicized by Harvard. There are so many great scientists aground the world doing great stuff. Let’s keep finding them and reporting on them! Please media, more of these types of stories and less clickbait please! I loved this article. My faith in humanity was restored just a touch here.

Normal_gaussian 9y ago
The irony is, we are very likely to have been baited here. Playing devils advocate: * Started with a plant -> thought about humans. Great insight or actively encouraged progression of research? Research that isn't about humans and their immediate crisis' is less valuable so receives less funding, to try and relate your research to humans is to pursue a primary incentive. Sounds a bit like the ever more fictional founding stories. * Rightly recognising cell autonomous vs non-autonomous processes. I'm not a biologist - but this sounds like something every leading biologist should recognise? * She is a woman. Presumably she didn't do this research alone, so there is an iceberg of people we aren't seeing. Looking back I don't think the Harvard Gazette is starved for things to write about, so there may in fact be selection bias towards women being shown over men - its politically favourable at the moment. * Not from an Ivy-League school being publicised by Harvard. Harvard slaps its name next to other people's research, promoting the superiority of its brand in giving handouts to sub-par institutions. I don't know how to play devils advocate on the philosophical approach; I'm biased - glad to see research in the upper echelons of biological research which considers the stoic approach.
klmr 9y ago
> 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 human biologist) has read. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a well-written article explaining the biology to a lay audience. But it doesn’t hold any striking new insights. All of this is not merely known but in fact fundamental knowledge. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hallmarks_of_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hallmarks_of_Cancer
- iak8god 9y ago
  > Don’t get me wrong: it’s a well-written article explaining the biology to a lay audience. But it doesn’t hold any striking new insights. This "article" in the Harvard Gazette is basically a press release about an invited lecture that happened at Harvard. If it manages to clearly and correctly explain any science, then it's already going above and beyond its main purpose. Edit: * Here is Athena Aktipis' lab site: http://www.aktipislab.org http://www.aktipislab.org * Here is a 2015 NYT article about her work that goes into more detail than this press release: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/28/science/cellular-cheaters-give-rise-to-cancer.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/28/science/cellular-cheaters... * This is the scientific article: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/370/1673/20140219 http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/370/1673/2014...
- tcj_phx 9y ago
  > 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 is similar to how the use of bloodletting persisted for hundreds of years [0], in spite of the low rates of success. [0] http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/theodoric-of-york/n8661?snl=1 http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/theodoric-of-yo... There's no need for new insights, the old insight needs to be fully developed. Your link has a subsection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hallmarks_of_Cancer#Deregulated_metabolism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hallmarks_of_Cancer#Deregu... Warburg's nobel prize was in 1931; we're finally realizing he was probably right all along. (minor edit)
fastball 9y ago
That she is a woman... publicity from Harvard I'd hate to break this to you, but that's definitely not surprising behavior from Harvard of all places. I mean, we're talking about the same Harvard, right?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
inteleng 9y ago
I find this comment extremely sexist.
- jtbayly 9y ago
  I find this comment to be devoid of reason.

homero 9y ago

A future where cancer is controlled but not cured is just as good and might be easier to achieve. I hope science gets there before I get cancer which is inevitable, unless I die from a heart attack.

agumonkey 9y ago
Methinks future lies in between. Many people say that we all have cancer, at different scales and different reach. So just avoiding massive tumors and metastasis is probable the goal.
jcims 9y ago
Agreed. My wife is going through this now, and the primary issue is the uncertainty around it all. Nobody can tell her what her future holds, just that there's a very high likelihood that 'success' will be fleeting and this won't be our last series of chemo. I may be misunderstanding what the author proposes, but if the threat of cancer was reduced to the physiological impacts of dormant tumors, I'm pretty sure we would consider that a win.
- spyspy 9y ago
  Always relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/931/ https://xkcd.com/931/ really helped visualize for me what going through cancer treatment is like. God speed.
  - jcims 9y ago
    This pretty much nails it. Thank you.
gjm11 9y ago
Look on the bright side: You might get hit by a bus instead.
pnutjam 9y ago
So cancer will only kill poor Americans?

domnomnom 9y ago

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 these days). My favorite is OpenBSD, they invent the cybersecurity. They were one of the first to implement address randomization for kernel and library loading. This is actually strikingly similar to what goes on with the genome with retrotransposons during early embryology stages. People really like to repeatmask (aka SINE/introns) genomes because it makes BLAST go faster. Ironically, arithmetic/statistical compression algorithms work really well with repeats (I don’t think this compressed state can be examined, but compression algorithms are seriously under appreciated).

smallhands 9y ago
I have no idea what the heck you are talking about but is human biology have computation at the core?
smallhands 9y ago
I have no idea what you are talking about but does human biology have computation at the core? Any papers on these?
- thraway180306 9y ago
  biology have computation at the core? Doubtful. You can to computing with DNA http://dna.caltech.edu http://dna.caltech.edu but it is still debated if the actual role of DNA is being a code (some recently weasel out form that stance by saying it's an “app”, like there's a difference, machine code being a code). Coding theory applied to DNA yields inconclusive results. Galois theory usually has power over any kind of information encoding, cryptographic, computable or not. One constructed one for DNA convinced mathematicians it's not the way to go at all. If it's computation it's nothing like what we mean by any model computation, you may as well say it's magic instead of making stretched analogies. About OpenBSD and evolution, that's so fetch... these folk invented the attack in the first place, not evolved a response to some market force in the early oughties. Broadly I don't think designed systems are in business of evolving, otherwise living organisms could perhaps evolved electro-hydrostatic instead of hydraulic power system with a pump being a single point of failure.

wgerard 9y ago

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 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 experiment I assisted with was basically putting them all together at differing ratios and seeing what happened over time - the different systems released different fluorescent proteins, so we could measure their relative populations. Common sense might dictate that the cheaters would rapidly outgrow the cooperators and eventually crash the whole system, but that actually didn't happen until very high ratios of cheaters. The cooperative yeast systems somehow managed to extinguish the cheaters pretty consistently (all the experiments were repeated and done in triplicate). This happened even at fairly absurd ratios like 3:1 cheaters:cooperators. Unfortunately, I left before any of the follow-up work to determine why that was happening. All that to say, it's fascinating how much cooperative systems really are favored in nature. Glad to see someone explicitly applying this idea to cancer.

QML 9y ago
Your post kind of reminds of two other articles along the same concept: [1] http://ncase.me/trust/ http://ncase.me/trust/ [2] https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-to-triumph-and-cooperate-in-game-theory-and-evolution-20171109/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-to-triumph-and-cooperate-...
sytelus 9y ago
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.

mikepetroff 9y ago

A video of her full talk is available here: https://www.facebook.com/harvardmuseumsofscienceandculture/videos/815475351995720/ https://www.facebook.com/harvardmuseumsofscienceandculture/v...

fredsted 9y ago
Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLgvdS3VEQk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLgvdS3VEQk

danharaj 9y ago

> This is what cancer cells do: Proliferate without limit, avoid cell death, monopolize resources, co-opt the labor of other cells, and destroy the surrounding environment. Rings a bell

gshubert17 9y ago
Agreed. What can society, which creates corporations, do to limit the likelihood that they will "go rogue" to harm society?
- lotsofpulp 9y ago
  I think the person you are responding to is alluding to humans, not corporations.
  - danharaj 9y ago
    Only under certain circumstances. It's not inevitable that we be this way. Our most powerful societies cultivate a condition where our economic activity is this way.
- wobbly99 9y ago
  Regulate them, limit them and in extreme cases kill them. And the thought that corporations are cancers of human societies that cheat is not a new.
  - 2chen 9y ago
    Corporations are more multicellular organisms than cancer. They are capable of achieving far more than a single cell or person, for better or for worse.
breckinloggins 9y ago
I was thinking the same thing. Those locust plagues are hugely devastating... Thinking beyond the snark for a bit, though, locusts might be an example of a species-level cancer cheating the “rules” of a habitat. Humans? We just throw the rules away altogether and have historically written new ones that only apply to us. The difference between us and locusts, though, is that many of us fight back against our own short term interests and argue “hey, we’re a tumor right now. We should consider not being one of those.”

bhickey 9y ago

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 heterogenous setting all bets are off. Cheater mutants have been widely observed and fall into two categories: obligatory and opportunistic cheaters. The obligatory cheaters refuse to participate in the stalk, while the opportunistic cheats preferentially segregate themselves into the fruit. It's easy to see how these behaviors might be beneficial. There's a double edge to obligatory cheating, though: in they cannot undergo sporulation.

AllegedAlec 9y ago
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 http://www.pnas.org/content/98/7/3879

aszantu 9y ago

https://ketogeek.com/blogs/news/episode-20-dr-thomas-seyfried https://ketogeek.com/blogs/news/episode-20-dr-thomas-seyfrie... coincidentally listening to that right now

wcr3 9y ago

trying to read around wtv font they used feels like my field of vision's being drawn and quartered.

artsnail 9y ago

How accurate is the comparison with plant fasciation, for anyone who knows more? My experience with owning/growing fasciated succulents (usually referred to as "crested" by growers and collectors) has been that they're more challenging to grow in terms of risks of things like overwatering, but as far as I know that behavior doesn't necessarily impact their overall lifespan. Sometimes a crested specimen can also revert back to normal growth. Maybe that's tangential to the article itself, but it's something I'd be curious to find more information about.