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I remember reading the chapter on cancer from the Alberts "Molecular Biology of the Cell" and even though I understood the basics of cancer at that point I was
by fabian2k 5y ago
I remember reading the chapter on cancer from the Alberts "Molecular Biology of the Cell" and even though I understood the basics of cancer at that point I was still suprised by many aspects. I didn't expect just how messed up the genome of cancer cells could be, with chromosomes fusing or duplicating. Of course these kind of extreme changes are very often lethal to the cell, but in the cases where they aren't they also provide the base for breaking enough control mechanisms that would otherwise prevent cancer.
Most cancer cells are genetically unstable, some mechanisms that usually reduce mutation rates are broken in them. And this enables them to accumulate the mass of mutations they need to actually become cancer.
The most striking hypothesis I read in that chapter was that telomere shortening could actually help a cell to become cancerous. I've no idea whether that idea help up, but it was pretty much the opposite of what I expected. The basic idea is that for cells that have a way to evade the usual stop of cell division for short telomeres, this becomes an advantage. The cells still divide, shortening telomeres so much that it destabilizes the genome. If the cell can survive that, it gains a large amount of the kind of genetic instability that is needed for it to become cancerous.
- asdff 5y agoA big issue is turning on things that shouldn't be turned on. A good way to imagine the chromosomes is like they are independent scripts with blocks of code. Some of the code is functional, some of it is code rot that is best left commented out. When you get a mutation that breaks the processes keeping the integrity of this codebase together, you end up sometimes seeing chunks of code cut and pasted around where it shouldn't be. Chunks fused together or separated, inverted, duplicated, removed entirely. This might result in code that should normally be commented out becoming uncommented and causing a lot of harm to the host.
- hotpotamus 5y agoThis comment reminds me of the first time I saw genetic code in github and realized that the analogy of computer code to genetic code is almost not an analogy because on some level they're the same thing. I find it interesting but uncomfortable.
- agumonkey 5y agocode but we don't have the interpreter figured out yet
- chasil 5y agoThe interpreter is the ribosome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribosome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribosome
- stainforth 5y agoAre there fields of study focusing on understanding life from that perspective?
- jcranmer 5y agoTo be honest, a better analogy is that the genetic code is an image of the disk drive, and we do understand the ISA of the processor it's running on. We have no clue what the operating system is, though, nor do we understood the boot process, nor do we even understand what the equivalent of the ELF file format is for this machine.
- m_fayer 5y agoThe thought that makes me most uncomfortable is the idea that we're reading code written by a dumb process, not a living thing. Dumb physical processes shouldn't be able to compose anything. It's like we broke into the universe's private files and found an infinity of insane scribbling, about us. It's uncanny.
- howdydoo 5y agoWe spent our lives searching for the Creator, and in the end all we found was GitHub Copilot
- csense 5y agoThe Human Genome Project's been completed for a long time. And didn't Google recently solve the protein folding problem? Shouldn't we have an assembler, compiler, and linker by now? What's taking so long?
- sjg007 5y agoViruses like to come in and inactivate and rearrange things too.