7 ms·

Physicists offer new theory on cancer

123 points by alphanumeric0 13y ago

bobwaycott 13y ago
From the source, Davies' argument (for those who don't want to register for Physics World): Cancers prevalence among multi-cellular organisms indicates it is "deeply embedded in the logic of life". It is found among mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and other organisms. The human genome is pre-loaded with a "cancer sub-routine" that is triggered by various factors. Once triggered, most cancers follow a similar pattern: reproduce uncontrollably in a specific organ, then spread throughout the host, invading and colonizing other organs and parts of the bodies with the help of tumors. > The overall impression is of a carefully orchestrated and pre-programmed strategy--its aim to multiply cancer cells and colonize new sites--which is unleashed when neoplastic cells somehow evade the normal regulatory mechanisms of the organism and embark on their own agenda. Seeing a "highly organized and efficient behaviour in biology" leads Davies and Lineweaver to suspect evolutionary mechanisms at play. Davies finds that orthodox explanations describing cancer as random genetic mutations starting from scratch leave too many unanswered questions--such as why they are fitter than the existing healthy cells in a body, why such random mutation provides "a whole series of mutually supportive survival traits ... in a period of just years of months", why dormant cancer returns in the same organ after a primary tumor is removed, or "why cancer cells deliberately transplanted into certain tissues, or cancer nuclei into healthy cells, often results in normal behaviour", while the reverse process results in cancerous cells. Thus, from a physics perspective, "there are clues pointing to cancer as a phenomenon influenced by forces and fields--not one that is purely ruled by genetic instruction." Sadly, the article never dives into more on this physics perspective and what kinds of forces and fields may be at play, instead turning to evolutionary biological arguments from embryonic development applied to cancer development. > Cells are usually regulated by mechanisms that instruct them when to multiply and when to die. What we believe is that when these mechanisms malfunction, the cells revert to the default option, a genetic subroutine programmed into their ancestors long ago, of behaving in a selfish way. > Lineweaver and I suggest that genes that are active in early-stage embryogenesis and silenced thereafter – which, by our hypothesis, are generally the ancient and highly conserved genes – may be inappropriately reactivated in the adult form as a result of some sort of insult or damage. This trigger serves to kick-start the cascade of maladaptation events we identify as cancer. So the "cancer subroutine" is really just a re-run of an embryonic developmental program. We envisage a collection of ancient conserved genes driving the cancer phenotype, in which the metastatic mobility of cancer cells and the invasion and colonization of other organs merely reflects the dynamically changing nature of embryonic cells and their ability to transform into different types of tissues. > The big picture is that we attribute cancer's survival traits to deep evolution on a billion-year scale, rather than orthodox explanations that point to evolution from scratch with each case of the disease. In our theory, the latter remains true, but is a small perturbation. The ASU article covers much of the rest of the original article by Davies. ASU just left out much of the lead-up to how they arrived at their conclusions. Physics World also has a lot more coverage in the current issue, entitled "Physics of Cancer". The entire issue can be downloaded as PDF here: http://physicsworld.com/cws/download/jul2013 http://physicsworld.com/cws/download/jul2013
bobwaycott 13y ago
Source article (requires login): http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/indepth/2013/jul/01/exposing-cancers-deep-evolutionary-roots http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/indepth/2013/jul/01/expo...
dnautics 13y ago
As a biologist and chemist studying cancer, this sounds an awful like the "ontology recapitulates phylogeny" theory which, while a cute just-so story, turns out to be a particularly misleading way of looking at developmental biology. and now I'm going to be pithy: Looks like some physicists think oncology recapitulates phylogeny.
- curtis 13y ago
  "Recapitulation theory" at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recapitulation_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recapitulation_theory
- btilly 13y ago
  As a biologist and chemist studying cancer, this sounds an awful like the "ontology recapitulates phylogeny" theory which, while a cute just-so story, turns out to be a particularly misleading way of looking at developmental biology. It is misleading, but with a small kernel of truth that appears in the article. That kernel is that there is little evolutionary pressure to cause changes in early development, and huge potential consequences to adjustment there, so early development is remarkably stable across many species. And this conservation goes right down to the genetic level. Thus it is wrong that we trace out our evolutionary heritage, however it is true that there are similarities between early development of distant species, and that commonality is due to conserved genes that evolved a very long time ago. (There is, of course, another commonality. And that is the observation due to Gould in Ontogeny and Phylogeny that a lot of the raw material for evolution comes from altering the timing and rates of existing development processes, rather than from introducing "new" features.)
  - dnautics 13y ago
    That cancer is predominantly not "just" a mutagenic defect but that it more specifically recruits developmental controls and make them go go awry is relatively new in biology, but not revolutionary.
    - btilly 13y ago
aheilbut 13y ago
This doesn't really sound like a completely new theory; Haeckel proposed in the 1800s that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", and it is widely understood that cancer is like a de-differentiated state.
jforman 13y ago
"Davies and Lineweaver are currently testing this prediction by comparing gene expression data from cancer biopsies with phylogenetic trees going back 1.6 billion years, with the help of Luis Cisneros, a postdoctoral researcher with ASU's Beyond Center." Press releases for untested scientific conjectures (further nerd-rage inducing by calling it a "theory" in official communication) raises a red flag for me: it suggests that the investigators aren't fully skeptical of whether their conjecture actually represents the real world, and increases the probability that they'll introduce bias in their investigation. The article (http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/indepth/2013/jul/01/exposing-cancers-deep-evolutionary-roots http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/indepth/2013/jul/01/expo...) is 100% hand-waving imo: "Could it be, we wonder, that cancer’s predilection for a hypoxic environment reflects the prevailing conditions on Earth at the time when multicellularity first evolved, before the second great oxygenation event?" "Wondering," alas, is not science! We need a model, a hypothesis, and a well-controlled experiment to actually discern truth.
- darkmighty 13y ago
  According to the article they are simply comparing gene expression from cancer cells to ancient lifeforms, which would directly support the theory. Seems reasonable to me.
  - jforman 13y ago
    The conjecture is reasonable. My point is that it's inappropriate to trump up an untested conjecture, as it creates a cost to the investigator for not being right. And you don't want to be incentivized in this way during your investigation: you're supposed to be fully skeptical.
    - sampo 13y ago
      > it's inappropriate to trump up an untested conjecture Like rushing to publish your conjecture of the molecular structure of DNA before it's fully verified with crystallography data?
stephengillie 13y ago
Off-topic: Does it bug anyone else that this guy's desktop is 3/4 covered in icons?
- swamp40 13y ago
  That's what my desktop looks like. I use it to store any file that I save because it's the first spot that pops up (and the easiest one to find no matter where you are) in Windows Explorer or when you right click and say "save as". Then every few months I shove them all into an "old desktop" folder. The horror.
- baxter001 13y ago
  I can't trust the research of a man with such poor desktop hygiene.
- deletes 13y ago
  I first noticed his inability to center or stretch the background image.
- marincounty 13y ago
  Funny!
- ddoolin 13y ago
  Immediately came here to be snarky and see if anyone else had noticed. I see someone beat me to it. Damn, haha.
gonzo 13y ago
ho-hum newbie-think consider the source "Arizona State University Regents' Professor in ASU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. “It is rather like Windows defaulting to ‘safe mode’ after suffering an insult of some sort.” <snicker> It's probably as attractive and simplistic as the old saw "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny". Kinda true at some levels, but not really. Sometimes functionally useful. Certainly not new. Wanna contribute to ASU? Have I got a real smart guy for you..... Or is that the London Bridge in Arizona?
riwsky 13y ago
PZ Myers, a biologist, gives a good reaction to some earlier news on these physicists at http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/04/26/aaargh-physicists/ http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/04/26/aaargh-physici...
- anthonyb 13y ago
  I stopped reading PZ Myers quite a while ago - he's almost entirely negative, and doesn't seem to be able to do much more than flame other people. eg. his little diatribe on Haekel. Ok, Haekel was wrong, but the initial processes behind embryo development must still be pretty old, right? Nope, apparently, even mentioning Haekel == wrong, and your whole argument is wrong and you're stupid and should be embarrassed, etc, etc.
selimthegrim 13y ago
I believe PZ Myers offers the definitive verdict. http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/11/20/aaargh-physicists-again/ http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/11/20/aaargh-physici...
- fernly 13y ago
  Myers visits the Davies/Lineweaver speculations three times, in April 2011 [0], November 2012[1], and December that year. PZ is quite scornful in all three posts, but after all, he is a biologist specializing in developmental biology -- so he can be assumed to know the literature, and the details of cell biology, which he claims they very clearly do not. [0]http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/04/26/aaargh-physicists/ http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/04/26/aaargh-physici... [1]http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/11/20/aaargh-physicists-again/ http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/11/20/aaargh-phy... [2]http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/12/19/aaargh-go-away-silly-physicists/ http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/12/19/aaargh-go-...
- rimantas 13y ago
  After seeing the title PZ Myers blog was the first thing that come to my mind.
microtherion 13y ago
Reading that title, I couldn’t help being reminded of http://xkcd.com/793 http://xkcd.com/793
- bobwaycott 13y ago
  love it
- pedrosorio 13y ago
  My thoughts exactly!
tokenadult 13y ago
Ah, yes, a university press release, with its well known role in the Science News Cycle. http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174 http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174 I wish these researchers well. Cancer has been tough to treat, http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/why-havent-we-cured-cancer-yet/ http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/why-havent-we-cured-canc... in large part because "cancer" is not really just one disease, but a general term for a variety of related diseases with many different kinds of outcomes and treatment trade-offs. If someone can find a very general commonality to most cancers, with a treatment for that commonality that is safe and effective (and not too expensive) for human beings around the world, that person will of course win a Nobel Prize in medicine. Here on Hacker News, over the 1704 days that I have been here, I have seen many kind submissions of breathless claims of breakthroughs in cancer research. We all desire that cancer breakthroughs happen. Follow-up, so far, has not suggested that any such cancer breakthrough actually has happened. I wish the researchers well, and I hope to hear later about placebo-controlled multicenter clinical trials that show that this approach is safe and effective for human medicine.
- opminion 13y ago
  Hum... the article does not talk about anything that could be placebo-controlled multicenter clinically trialled. It's just about some dudes deriving conclusions from the relationship between embryo development and (what they call) cancer, with a couple of predictions thrown in to make their theory falsifiable. As a press release is not that bad.
  - arkades 13y ago
    "deriving conclusions from the relationship between embryo development and (what they call) cancer" Except that they repeatedly say "The new theory predicts that as cancer progresses through more and more malignant stages, it will express genes that are more deeply conserved among multicellular organisms, and so are in some sense more ancient". So, just to be clear, they're not deriving conclusions from a relationship between embryonic development and (what they call) cancer - they're deriving a relationship from their conclusions. Physicists poking their noses into fields they know absolutely nothing about and making grand pronouncements isn't new. Why this is a 2013 press release I don't know - they basically published on this in 2011 (http://iopscience.iop.org/1478-3975/8/1/015001 http://iopscience.iop.org/1478-3975/8/1/015001) though they seem to be no further along now than they were then - which is nowhere, since in 2011 they were basically still saying "We think these are atavistic genes, here is the sort of research agenda that might reveal this..." and then they didn't undertake that research, as far as I can find. They're still just speculating on it.
eclipxe 13y ago
"This could provide clues to future treatments. For example, when life took the momentous step from single cells to multicellular assemblages, Earth had low levels of oxygen. Sure enough, cancer reverts to an ancient form of metabolism called fermentation, which can supply energy with little need for oxygen, although it requires lots of sugar. Davies and Lineweaver predict that if cancer cells are saturated with oxygen but deprived of sugar, they will become more stressed than healthy cells, slowing them down or even killing them. ASU’s Center for the Convergence of Physical Science and Cancer Biology, of which Davies is principal investigator, is planning a workshop in November to examine the clinical evidence for this." This stood out at me as particularly interesting - especially as someone that tries to limit sugar and carbohydrate intake. I've heard other theories about sugar helping cancer spread - does anyone have more information or research on this?
nicholas73 13y ago
I am surprised that the majority of comments ridicule or scorn this idea. I found it to be at least an explorable link, even if it would yield no practical cure. It was nice to know which genes are involved, which still makes no claim on the trigger of cancer. It merely states that forms of stress could activate this, and this still would be in line with current theory of one-off mutations (that is, the tangible result after the event).
- novalis78 13y ago
  >even if it would yield no practical cure. But it seems they suggest something, indirectly: go jogging (more oxygen) and ban/reduce sugar consumption.
molbioguy 13y ago
Physicists have made great contributions to molecular biology, but this isn't one of those cases. This one is so wrong at so many levels it's hard to to justice to it. Much of it just misinterprets things we already know. In the article it says: Davies and Lineweaver claim that cancer is actually an organized and systematic response to some sort of stress or physical challenge. It might be triggered by a random accident, they say, but thereafter it more or less predictably unfolds. There's nothing new here. Cancer is basically deregulated cellular replication and proliferation. These are core processes in multicellular organisms, so of course they unfold predictably. The trigger is often a mutation ("random accident") in a key regulatory gene. The article says the new theory "challenges the orthodox view that cancer develops anew in each host". But we know that the mechanism of proliferation does not develop anew in each cancer; only the trigger is different in different cancers. The physicists say “We envisage cancer as the execution of an ancient program pre-loaded into the genomes of all cells,” and that "it will express genes that are more deeply conserved among multicellular organisms, and so are in some sense more ancient." Since cellular replication programs are deeply rooted and ancient because they are fundamental processes, this shouldn't be surprising. "Sure enough, cancer reverts to an ancient form of metabolism called fermentation, which can supply energy with little need for oxygen, although it requires lots of sugar." Guess they are unaware that your muscle cells do they same when they are starved for oxygen! Anaerobic "fermentation" is a standard part of our metabolic system under certain conditions. This goes on and on...
- llgrrl_ 13y ago
  Agreed. I am not good enough to judge the whole article on physicsworld but the author seems to be bullshitting on at least some of the things he wrote. For example: > Evolution builds on what has gone before (our remote ancestors were fish), Fish and us share the same ancestor. It doesn't mean that our ancestor is fish. For people who aren't familiar with the matter... It's like saying my niece and me, we share the same ancestor (and has several similar properties), versus, my niece's ancestors were me or vice versa, which is plain out wrong.
- nikster 13y ago
  I don't see you pointing out anything that is wrong?! I also disagree that all that stuff should be obvious to everybody. Certainly wasnt to me, although it makes sense, which is why it's interesting. Rather than saying "hell, anybody can get cancer and we have no idea why" these guys seem to think about its role in evolution. They are thinking about it not as a random mutation but as an intentional genetic program which just makes much more sense. Like in any criminal investigation, answering the cui bono question is imperative. I agree with the people in the paper actually: A deeper understanding is necessary. We dont know whether that will lead to a cure but as a software engineer its my experience that you can't fix a bug you don't understand. (And it amazes me so many of my fellow engineer try....)
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
eridius 13y ago
A physicist chiming in on matters outside of the field of physics? Why am I not surprised. Relevant SMBC: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2556 http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2556
- bobwaycott 13y ago
  Chiming in? These physicists were asked to join 12 cross-disciplinary centers with other cancer specialists, setup by the US National Cancer Institute, and Davies was asked to lead one such center. He's not chiming in on anything; he's doing the job he was asked to do. Whether this theory ever gets beyond discussions with field experts is another story. But as it stands, he's not just lobbing fly balls to the outfield for no reason.
IgorPartola 13y ago
Odd. I always assumed that cancer was a natural part of a living organism, and that what got disrupted was the "cancer suppression mechanism" (not a technical term). The fact that cancer evolves anew in every patient seems very... improbable.
- bobwaycott 13y ago
  Yeah. Similarly, I pretty much landed (around a decade ago) on seeing cancer as little more than a small subset of death for which we'd identified features and given it a name--i.e., before humans identified cancer, people just died for then-unknown reasons (which were likely, at given points in history, called 'natural causes'). Once we identified cancer, people 'got cancer' and, subsequently, a varying percentage of such people died, with that percentage declining as understanding and treatment improved. I remain fascinated by cancer research and the hope for a cure because I remain fascinated by seeing humans practicing science discover more ways to identify death and prevent it.
swamp40 13y ago
Is it true that the latest scientific consensus about cancer is that it is the result of random genetic mutations? Yet there are only about 200 well defined types of cancer that just appear over and over again, millions of times per year? And then someone suggests that the mechanism and progression path might be embedded into our DNA, and it gets called pseudoscience?
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  No, it is not true that the scientific consensus on cancer is that it is caused exclusively by random genetic mutations. Different cancers have different causes. There are, for instance, a small number of viruses that together cause a sizable fraction of cancers. Viruses make fairly specific genetic changes.
jasonkolb 13y ago
I love the fact that physicists are looking at this problem. I really love the way they think--that there are underlying elegant solutions to inherently messy problems. I think it speaks to how much you think the universe makes sense underneath everything, and they see it on a daily basis. Hence, the success and reknown of an Einstein for example: someone who takes the currently-best-known-answers and makes them simpler, more elegant. I think this sort of thinking needs to be applied in many more fields than it is, and it's very encouraging to see some people from outside the traditional medicine groups even looking at this supremely important problem. We don't need more drug studies, we need more root cause analysis.
lvs 13y ago
This bullshit is bullshit incarnate.
lnanek2 13y ago
Sounds like they are coming up with testable predictions, so rock on! That's how it works in physics. Come up with a model, check the predictions, if the model is nuts but predicts well, you have no choice but to accept it until something better comes along. See General Relativity and it's bizarre time space bending and stretching. And Quantum Mechanics. All the biologists going nuts in this thread sound just like people who couldn't accept things can be in multiple states at once.
jlebrech 13y ago
if you turned the gene off would you be able to have kids though?
teekert 13y ago
Well, as a molecular biologist I can't say I ever saw cancer in any other way. What's so new about this? We all know that embryonic, proliferation and stem cell associated pathways like the Wnt pathway and the PI3K pathway commonly are the ones that get out of hand in cancers. We also know that proliferation in single cells is the highest goal and that the uncontrolled division of a single cell (as it probably did when still living alone) leads to problems in higher organisms. If the fail-safes that developed to allow for multicellular organisms fail to prevent the egocentric behaviour of individual cells and a cell reverts back to a "divide as fast as you can"-state, they become what we call cancer cells. I fail to see the news value in this article.
mathattack 13y ago
I get nervous when physicists wander too far from Physics. They're a smart lot, but look what happened when they went into Finance. :-) It takes a while to apply the math skills properly elsewhere.

123 points by alphanumeric0 13y ago

From the source, Davies' argument (for those who don't want to register for Physics World): Cancers prevalence among multi-cellular organisms indicates it is "deeply embedded in the logic of life". It is found among mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and other organisms. The human genome is pre-loaded with a "cancer sub-routine" that is triggered by various factors. Once triggered, most cancers follow a similar pattern: reproduce uncontrollably in a specific organ, then spread throughout the host, invading and colonizing other organs and parts of the bodies with the help of tumors. > The overall impression is of a carefully orchestrated and pre-programmed strategy--its aim to multiply cancer cells and colonize new sites--which is unleashed when neoplastic cells somehow evade the normal regulatory mechanisms of the organism and embark on their own agenda. Seeing a "highly organized and efficient behaviour in biology" leads Davies and Lineweaver to suspect evolutionary mechanisms at play. Davies finds that orthodox explanations describing cancer as random genetic mutations starting from scratch leave too many unanswered questions--such as why they are fitter than the existing healthy cells in a body, why such random mutation provides "a whole series of mutually supportive survival traits ... in a period of just years of months", why dormant cancer returns in the same organ after a primary tumor is removed, or "why cancer cells deliberately transplanted into certain tissues, or cancer nuclei into healthy cells, often results in normal behaviour", while the reverse process results in cancerous cells. Thus, from a physics perspective, "there are clues pointing to cancer as a phenomenon influenced by forces and fields--not one that is purely ruled by genetic instruction." Sadly, the article never dives into more on this physics perspective and what kinds of forces and fields may be at play, instead turning to evolutionary biological arguments from embryonic development applied to cancer development. > Cells are usually regulated by mechanisms that instruct them when to multiply and when to die. What we believe is that when these mechanisms malfunction, the cells revert to the default option, a genetic subroutine programmed into their ancestors long ago, of behaving in a selfish way. > Lineweaver and I suggest that genes that are active in early-stage embryogenesis and silenced thereafter – which, by our hypothesis, are generally the ancient and highly conserved genes – may be inappropriately reactivated in the adult form as a result of some sort of insult or damage. This trigger serves to kick-start the cascade of maladaptation events we identify as cancer. So the "cancer subroutine" is really just a re-run of an embryonic developmental program. We envisage a collection of ancient conserved genes driving the cancer phenotype, in which the metastatic mobility of cancer cells and the invasion and colonization of other organs merely reflects the dynamically changing nature of embryonic cells and their ability to transform into different types of tissues. > The big picture is that we attribute cancer's survival traits to deep evolution on a billion-year scale, rather than orthodox explanations that point to evolution from scratch with each case of the disease. In our theory, the latter remains true, but is a small perturbation. The ASU article covers much of the rest of the original article by Davies. ASU just left out much of the lead-up to how they arrived at their conclusions. Physics World also has a lot more coverage in the current issue, entitled "Physics of Cancer". The entire issue can be downloaded as PDF here: http://physicsworld.com/cws/download/jul2013 http://physicsworld.com/cws/download/jul2013

bobwaycott 13y ago

Source article (requires login): http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/indepth/2013/jul/01/exposing-cancers-deep-evolutionary-roots http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/indepth/2013/jul/01/expo...

dnautics 13y ago

As a biologist and chemist studying cancer, this sounds an awful like the "ontology recapitulates phylogeny" theory which, while a cute just-so story, turns out to be a particularly misleading way of looking at developmental biology. and now I'm going to be pithy: Looks like some physicists think oncology recapitulates phylogeny.

curtis 13y ago
"Recapitulation theory" at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recapitulation_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recapitulation_theory
btilly 13y ago
As a biologist and chemist studying cancer, this sounds an awful like the "ontology recapitulates phylogeny" theory which, while a cute just-so story, turns out to be a particularly misleading way of looking at developmental biology. It is misleading, but with a small kernel of truth that appears in the article. That kernel is that there is little evolutionary pressure to cause changes in early development, and huge potential consequences to adjustment there, so early development is remarkably stable across many species. And this conservation goes right down to the genetic level. Thus it is wrong that we trace out our evolutionary heritage, however it is true that there are similarities between early development of distant species, and that commonality is due to conserved genes that evolved a very long time ago. (There is, of course, another commonality. And that is the observation due to Gould in Ontogeny and Phylogeny that a lot of the raw material for evolution comes from altering the timing and rates of existing development processes, rather than from introducing "new" features.)
- dnautics 13y ago
  That cancer is predominantly not "just" a mutagenic defect but that it more specifically recruits developmental controls and make them go go awry is relatively new in biology, but not revolutionary.
  - btilly 13y ago

aheilbut 13y ago

This doesn't really sound like a completely new theory; Haeckel proposed in the 1800s that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", and it is widely understood that cancer is like a de-differentiated state.

jforman 13y ago

"Davies and Lineweaver are currently testing this prediction by comparing gene expression data from cancer biopsies with phylogenetic trees going back 1.6 billion years, with the help of Luis Cisneros, a postdoctoral researcher with ASU's Beyond Center." Press releases for untested scientific conjectures (further nerd-rage inducing by calling it a "theory" in official communication) raises a red flag for me: it suggests that the investigators aren't fully skeptical of whether their conjecture actually represents the real world, and increases the probability that they'll introduce bias in their investigation. The article (http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/indepth/2013/jul/01/exposing-cancers-deep-evolutionary-roots http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/indepth/2013/jul/01/expo...) is 100% hand-waving imo: "Could it be, we wonder, that cancer’s predilection for a hypoxic environment reflects the prevailing conditions on Earth at the time when multicellularity first evolved, before the second great oxygenation event?" "Wondering," alas, is not science! We need a model, a hypothesis, and a well-controlled experiment to actually discern truth.

darkmighty 13y ago
According to the article they are simply comparing gene expression from cancer cells to ancient lifeforms, which would directly support the theory. Seems reasonable to me.
- jforman 13y ago
  The conjecture is reasonable. My point is that it's inappropriate to trump up an untested conjecture, as it creates a cost to the investigator for not being right. And you don't want to be incentivized in this way during your investigation: you're supposed to be fully skeptical.
  - sampo 13y ago
    > it's inappropriate to trump up an untested conjecture Like rushing to publish your conjecture of the molecular structure of DNA before it's fully verified with crystallography data?

stephengillie 13y ago

Off-topic: Does it bug anyone else that this guy's desktop is 3/4 covered in icons?

swamp40 13y ago
That's what my desktop looks like. I use it to store any file that I save because it's the first spot that pops up (and the easiest one to find no matter where you are) in Windows Explorer or when you right click and say "save as". Then every few months I shove them all into an "old desktop" folder. The horror.
baxter001 13y ago
I can't trust the research of a man with such poor desktop hygiene.
deletes 13y ago
I first noticed his inability to center or stretch the background image.
marincounty 13y ago
Funny!
ddoolin 13y ago
Immediately came here to be snarky and see if anyone else had noticed. I see someone beat me to it. Damn, haha.

gonzo 13y ago

ho-hum newbie-think consider the source "Arizona State University Regents' Professor in ASU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. “It is rather like Windows defaulting to ‘safe mode’ after suffering an insult of some sort.” <snicker> It's probably as attractive and simplistic as the old saw "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny". Kinda true at some levels, but not really. Sometimes functionally useful. Certainly not new. Wanna contribute to ASU? Have I got a real smart guy for you..... Or is that the London Bridge in Arizona?

riwsky 13y ago

PZ Myers, a biologist, gives a good reaction to some earlier news on these physicists at http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/04/26/aaargh-physicists/ http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/04/26/aaargh-physici...

anthonyb 13y ago
I stopped reading PZ Myers quite a while ago - he's almost entirely negative, and doesn't seem to be able to do much more than flame other people. eg. his little diatribe on Haekel. Ok, Haekel was wrong, but the initial processes behind embryo development must still be pretty old, right? Nope, apparently, even mentioning Haekel == wrong, and your whole argument is wrong and you're stupid and should be embarrassed, etc, etc.

selimthegrim 13y ago

I believe PZ Myers offers the definitive verdict. http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/11/20/aaargh-physicists-again/ http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/11/20/aaargh-physici...

fernly 13y ago
Myers visits the Davies/Lineweaver speculations three times, in April 2011 [0], November 2012[1], and December that year. PZ is quite scornful in all three posts, but after all, he is a biologist specializing in developmental biology -- so he can be assumed to know the literature, and the details of cell biology, which he claims they very clearly do not. [0]http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/04/26/aaargh-physicists/ http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/04/26/aaargh-physici... [1]http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/11/20/aaargh-physicists-again/ http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/11/20/aaargh-phy... [2]http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/12/19/aaargh-go-away-silly-physicists/ http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/12/19/aaargh-go-...
rimantas 13y ago
After seeing the title PZ Myers blog was the first thing that come to my mind.

microtherion 13y ago

Reading that title, I couldn’t help being reminded of http://xkcd.com/793 http://xkcd.com/793

bobwaycott 13y ago
love it
pedrosorio 13y ago
My thoughts exactly!

tokenadult 13y ago

Ah, yes, a university press release, with its well known role in the Science News Cycle. http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174 http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174 I wish these researchers well. Cancer has been tough to treat, http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/why-havent-we-cured-cancer-yet/ http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/why-havent-we-cured-canc... in large part because "cancer" is not really just one disease, but a general term for a variety of related diseases with many different kinds of outcomes and treatment trade-offs. If someone can find a very general commonality to most cancers, with a treatment for that commonality that is safe and effective (and not too expensive) for human beings around the world, that person will of course win a Nobel Prize in medicine. Here on Hacker News, over the 1704 days that I have been here, I have seen many kind submissions of breathless claims of breakthroughs in cancer research. We all desire that cancer breakthroughs happen. Follow-up, so far, has not suggested that any such cancer breakthrough actually has happened. I wish the researchers well, and I hope to hear later about placebo-controlled multicenter clinical trials that show that this approach is safe and effective for human medicine.

opminion 13y ago
Hum... the article does not talk about anything that could be placebo-controlled multicenter clinically trialled. It's just about some dudes deriving conclusions from the relationship between embryo development and (what they call) cancer, with a couple of predictions thrown in to make their theory falsifiable. As a press release is not that bad.
- arkades 13y ago
  "deriving conclusions from the relationship between embryo development and (what they call) cancer" Except that they repeatedly say "The new theory predicts that as cancer progresses through more and more malignant stages, it will express genes that are more deeply conserved among multicellular organisms, and so are in some sense more ancient". So, just to be clear, they're not deriving conclusions from a relationship between embryonic development and (what they call) cancer - they're deriving a relationship from their conclusions. Physicists poking their noses into fields they know absolutely nothing about and making grand pronouncements isn't new. Why this is a 2013 press release I don't know - they basically published on this in 2011 (http://iopscience.iop.org/1478-3975/8/1/015001 http://iopscience.iop.org/1478-3975/8/1/015001) though they seem to be no further along now than they were then - which is nowhere, since in 2011 they were basically still saying "We think these are atavistic genes, here is the sort of research agenda that might reveal this..." and then they didn't undertake that research, as far as I can find. They're still just speculating on it.

eclipxe 13y ago

"This could provide clues to future treatments. For example, when life took the momentous step from single cells to multicellular assemblages, Earth had low levels of oxygen. Sure enough, cancer reverts to an ancient form of metabolism called fermentation, which can supply energy with little need for oxygen, although it requires lots of sugar. Davies and Lineweaver predict that if cancer cells are saturated with oxygen but deprived of sugar, they will become more stressed than healthy cells, slowing them down or even killing them. ASU’s Center for the Convergence of Physical Science and Cancer Biology, of which Davies is principal investigator, is planning a workshop in November to examine the clinical evidence for this." This stood out at me as particularly interesting - especially as someone that tries to limit sugar and carbohydrate intake. I've heard other theories about sugar helping cancer spread - does anyone have more information or research on this?

nicholas73 13y ago

I am surprised that the majority of comments ridicule or scorn this idea. I found it to be at least an explorable link, even if it would yield no practical cure. It was nice to know which genes are involved, which still makes no claim on the trigger of cancer. It merely states that forms of stress could activate this, and this still would be in line with current theory of one-off mutations (that is, the tangible result after the event).

novalis78 13y ago
>even if it would yield no practical cure. But it seems they suggest something, indirectly: go jogging (more oxygen) and ban/reduce sugar consumption.

molbioguy 13y ago

Physicists have made great contributions to molecular biology, but this isn't one of those cases. This one is so wrong at so many levels it's hard to to justice to it. Much of it just misinterprets things we already know. In the article it says: Davies and Lineweaver claim that cancer is actually an organized and systematic response to some sort of stress or physical challenge. It might be triggered by a random accident, they say, but thereafter it more or less predictably unfolds. There's nothing new here. Cancer is basically deregulated cellular replication and proliferation. These are core processes in multicellular organisms, so of course they unfold predictably. The trigger is often a mutation ("random accident") in a key regulatory gene. The article says the new theory "challenges the orthodox view that cancer develops anew in each host". But we know that the mechanism of proliferation does not develop anew in each cancer; only the trigger is different in different cancers. The physicists say “We envisage cancer as the execution of an ancient program pre-loaded into the genomes of all cells,” and that "it will express genes that are more deeply conserved among multicellular organisms, and so are in some sense more ancient." Since cellular replication programs are deeply rooted and ancient because they are fundamental processes, this shouldn't be surprising. "Sure enough, cancer reverts to an ancient form of metabolism called fermentation, which can supply energy with little need for oxygen, although it requires lots of sugar." Guess they are unaware that your muscle cells do they same when they are starved for oxygen! Anaerobic "fermentation" is a standard part of our metabolic system under certain conditions. This goes on and on...

llgrrl_ 13y ago
Agreed. I am not good enough to judge the whole article on physicsworld but the author seems to be bullshitting on at least some of the things he wrote. For example: > Evolution builds on what has gone before (our remote ancestors were fish), Fish and us share the same ancestor. It doesn't mean that our ancestor is fish. For people who aren't familiar with the matter... It's like saying my niece and me, we share the same ancestor (and has several similar properties), versus, my niece's ancestors were me or vice versa, which is plain out wrong.
nikster 13y ago
I don't see you pointing out anything that is wrong?! I also disagree that all that stuff should be obvious to everybody. Certainly wasnt to me, although it makes sense, which is why it's interesting. Rather than saying "hell, anybody can get cancer and we have no idea why" these guys seem to think about its role in evolution. They are thinking about it not as a random mutation but as an intentional genetic program which just makes much more sense. Like in any criminal investigation, answering the cui bono question is imperative. I agree with the people in the paper actually: A deeper understanding is necessary. We dont know whether that will lead to a cure but as a software engineer its my experience that you can't fix a bug you don't understand. (And it amazes me so many of my fellow engineer try....)

deleted 13y ago

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eridius 13y ago

A physicist chiming in on matters outside of the field of physics? Why am I not surprised. Relevant SMBC: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2556 http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2556

bobwaycott 13y ago
Chiming in? These physicists were asked to join 12 cross-disciplinary centers with other cancer specialists, setup by the US National Cancer Institute, and Davies was asked to lead one such center. He's not chiming in on anything; he's doing the job he was asked to do. Whether this theory ever gets beyond discussions with field experts is another story. But as it stands, he's not just lobbing fly balls to the outfield for no reason.

IgorPartola 13y ago

Odd. I always assumed that cancer was a natural part of a living organism, and that what got disrupted was the "cancer suppression mechanism" (not a technical term). The fact that cancer evolves anew in every patient seems very... improbable.

bobwaycott 13y ago
Yeah. Similarly, I pretty much landed (around a decade ago) on seeing cancer as little more than a small subset of death for which we'd identified features and given it a name--i.e., before humans identified cancer, people just died for then-unknown reasons (which were likely, at given points in history, called 'natural causes'). Once we identified cancer, people 'got cancer' and, subsequently, a varying percentage of such people died, with that percentage declining as understanding and treatment improved. I remain fascinated by cancer research and the hope for a cure because I remain fascinated by seeing humans practicing science discover more ways to identify death and prevent it.

swamp40 13y ago

Is it true that the latest scientific consensus about cancer is that it is the result of random genetic mutations? Yet there are only about 200 well defined types of cancer that just appear over and over again, millions of times per year? And then someone suggests that the mechanism and progression path might be embedded into our DNA, and it gets called pseudoscience?

dragonwriter 13y ago
No, it is not true that the scientific consensus on cancer is that it is caused exclusively by random genetic mutations. Different cancers have different causes. There are, for instance, a small number of viruses that together cause a sizable fraction of cancers. Viruses make fairly specific genetic changes.

jasonkolb 13y ago

I love the fact that physicists are looking at this problem. I really love the way they think--that there are underlying elegant solutions to inherently messy problems. I think it speaks to how much you think the universe makes sense underneath everything, and they see it on a daily basis. Hence, the success and reknown of an Einstein for example: someone who takes the currently-best-known-answers and makes them simpler, more elegant. I think this sort of thinking needs to be applied in many more fields than it is, and it's very encouraging to see some people from outside the traditional medicine groups even looking at this supremely important problem. We don't need more drug studies, we need more root cause analysis.

lvs 13y ago

This bullshit is bullshit incarnate.

lnanek2 13y ago

Sounds like they are coming up with testable predictions, so rock on! That's how it works in physics. Come up with a model, check the predictions, if the model is nuts but predicts well, you have no choice but to accept it until something better comes along. See General Relativity and it's bizarre time space bending and stretching. And Quantum Mechanics. All the biologists going nuts in this thread sound just like people who couldn't accept things can be in multiple states at once.

jlebrech 13y ago

if you turned the gene off would you be able to have kids though?

teekert 13y ago

Well, as a molecular biologist I can't say I ever saw cancer in any other way. What's so new about this? We all know that embryonic, proliferation and stem cell associated pathways like the Wnt pathway and the PI3K pathway commonly are the ones that get out of hand in cancers. We also know that proliferation in single cells is the highest goal and that the uncontrolled division of a single cell (as it probably did when still living alone) leads to problems in higher organisms. If the fail-safes that developed to allow for multicellular organisms fail to prevent the egocentric behaviour of individual cells and a cell reverts back to a "divide as fast as you can"-state, they become what we call cancer cells. I fail to see the news value in this article.

mathattack 13y ago

I get nervous when physicists wander too far from Physics. They're a smart lot, but look what happened when they went into Finance. :-) It takes a while to apply the math skills properly elsewhere.