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That part is easy, the hard part is not causing cancer when doing so. For example, cancer cell lines often have lots of telomerase activity. The creation of imm
by f38zf5vdt 5y ago
That part is easy, the hard part is not causing cancer when doing so. For example, cancer cell lines often have lots of telomerase activity. The creation of immortal human cell lines through site-directed mutagenesis is easy, since we know most of the genes that promote cellular immortality from studying cancer.
- jolux 5y agoIsn’t the body hostile to cancerous cells too?
- f38zf5vdt 5y agoUp to a point. Cancer is the result of multiple mutations to growth regulation genes and immunogenic factors that collectively lead to immortal cell lines that are able to evade the immune system. The more mutations you introduce to try to immortalize your cell lines, the closer they get to becoming pathologically cancer.
- grishka 5y agoFor cancer, there's other research. Google Michael Levin and his morphogenesis research. In short: when an organism grows, it needs to store the intermediate state of its growth somewhere (in the same sense that you have a counter and an end condition in a for loop), and cells need to communicate somehow to coordinate their division and specialization. That somewhere is in electrical potentials between cells. He came to a (sensible) conclusion that cancer occurs when a bunch of cells falls out of this network. And indeed, he was able to induce a tumor in a tadpole, and then make it go away by "plugging" these cells back into the network. It's really fascinating and a bit creepy.