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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/co

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.
  - bobwaycott 13y ago
    Okay, you're right about deriving a relationship from their conclusions. At least mostly. There's certainly an interesting set of possibilities to be pursued where the idea is concerned with evolutionary processes and thinking outside the box of seeing cancer as purely a random mutation, and the problematic questions Davies and Lineweaver pose from that standing perspective. Yes, they are speculating on a potential new direction of study based on being outside observers who specialize in physical systems and recognizing orchestrated, systemic actions. However, let's dial down the disdain slightly, can we? These aren't physicists arbitrarily and whimsically "poking their noses into fields they know absolutely nothing about and making grand pronouncements". These are physicists who have been asked to poke their noses into something they know absolutely nothing about and help existing specialists uncover potentially new avenues of research. Davies makes this very clear in his opening statements of the article. He admits he knew nothing about cancer, and started asking questions that were not typically the questions asked by standing specialists--who show a pattern of questioning and investigating cancer from that perspective of a random genetic mutation that occurs in humans, and not investigating the possibilities that might be found in questioning cancer as a feature of multi-cellular life as a whole. Davies and Lineweaver are not saying this is the fundamental theory of what cancer is. They are suggesting it as a possibility of future research and investigation and, given their work in their own fields, I strongly suspect they'll be willing to update their notions based on evidence. Who knows where we can get if more respected scientists joined cross-disciplinary programs that were aimed at collaborating on investigating and understanding various human concerns. It's not like the physicists who've joined these programs (of which Davies and Lineweaver are but two) are going to set back cancer research and treatment.
  - dnautics 13y ago
    "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." The good news is that we already have that data! From 2005. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15920528 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15920528 And the story, is, of course that it's waaay more complicated than that. For that matter, we know a lot of cancers (e.g. CML) come about in no small part due to fusion proteins - which would be if anything, the creation of a novel protein, not a gene that is 'deeply conserved'.
jliptzin 13y ago
Breakthroughs are always in the last place you look.
- fleitz 13y ago
  Probably because you stop looking after you've found the solution.
  - jessaustin 13y ago
    Yeah I think that's the joke.
juretriglav 13y ago
"Cures cancer" might as well be a red flag when reading press releases. I've recently won a hackathon (http://hack4ac.com http://hack4ac.com) with an idea to cut the middlemen out of the science news cycle with only a single link remaining: from the scientist to the general public. It was built to prevent this sort of misinformation, intentional or not. I believe it usually is unintentional and is just a side product of all of the players in the science news cycle playing their part in the game of 'telephone', and information just gets mangled. The project (ScienceGist) puts scientists into the driver's seat of their own communication with the public. ScienceGist is a < 2 weeks old open source project https://github.com/jure/sciencegist https://github.com/jure/sciencegist http://www.sciencegist.com http://www.sciencegist.com looking for contributors who think scientific communication is a crucial problem to solve.

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.
- bobwaycott 13y ago
  Okay, you're right about deriving a relationship from their conclusions. At least mostly. There's certainly an interesting set of possibilities to be pursued where the idea is concerned with evolutionary processes and thinking outside the box of seeing cancer as purely a random mutation, and the problematic questions Davies and Lineweaver pose from that standing perspective. Yes, they are speculating on a potential new direction of study based on being outside observers who specialize in physical systems and recognizing orchestrated, systemic actions. However, let's dial down the disdain slightly, can we? These aren't physicists arbitrarily and whimsically "poking their noses into fields they know absolutely nothing about and making grand pronouncements". These are physicists who have been asked to poke their noses into something they know absolutely nothing about and help existing specialists uncover potentially new avenues of research. Davies makes this very clear in his opening statements of the article. He admits he knew nothing about cancer, and started asking questions that were not typically the questions asked by standing specialists--who show a pattern of questioning and investigating cancer from that perspective of a random genetic mutation that occurs in humans, and not investigating the possibilities that might be found in questioning cancer as a feature of multi-cellular life as a whole. Davies and Lineweaver are not saying this is the fundamental theory of what cancer is. They are suggesting it as a possibility of future research and investigation and, given their work in their own fields, I strongly suspect they'll be willing to update their notions based on evidence. Who knows where we can get if more respected scientists joined cross-disciplinary programs that were aimed at collaborating on investigating and understanding various human concerns. It's not like the physicists who've joined these programs (of which Davies and Lineweaver are but two) are going to set back cancer research and treatment.
- dnautics 13y ago
  "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." The good news is that we already have that data! From 2005. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15920528 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15920528 And the story, is, of course that it's waaay more complicated than that. For that matter, we know a lot of cancers (e.g. CML) come about in no small part due to fusion proteins - which would be if anything, the creation of a novel protein, not a gene that is 'deeply conserved'.

jliptzin 13y ago

Breakthroughs are always in the last place you look.

fleitz 13y ago
Probably because you stop looking after you've found the solution.
- jessaustin 13y ago
  Yeah I think that's the joke.

juretriglav 13y ago

"Cures cancer" might as well be a red flag when reading press releases. I've recently won a hackathon (http://hack4ac.com http://hack4ac.com) with an idea to cut the middlemen out of the science news cycle with only a single link remaining: from the scientist to the general public. It was built to prevent this sort of misinformation, intentional or not. I believe it usually is unintentional and is just a side product of all of the players in the science news cycle playing their part in the game of 'telephone', and information just gets mangled. The project (ScienceGist) puts scientists into the driver's seat of their own communication with the public. ScienceGist is a < 2 weeks old open source project https://github.com/jure/sciencegist https://github.com/jure/sciencegist http://www.sciencegist.com http://www.sciencegist.com looking for contributors who think scientific communication is a crucial problem to solve.