Tag Archives: cancer

Are humans a cancer on the planet?

Leave a reply

This is the premise of Warren Hern in a new book called Homo Ecophagus: A Deep Diagnosis to Save the Earth.

The basic premise is that humans have the capacity of developing culture, and that has millions of manifestations, everything from language and speech and mathematics to constructing shelters, building weapons and having medical care to keep us alive. These adaptations have allowed us to go from a few separate species of skinny primates wandering around in Africa a couple of million years ago to being the dominant ecological force on the planet to the point we’re changing the entire global ecosystem…

These cultural adaptations have now become maladaptive. They do not have survival value. And they are, in fact, malignant maladaptations because they’re increasing in a way that cancer increases. So, this means that the human species now has all of the major characteristics of a malignant process. When I was in medical school, we had four of them that were identified: rapid, uncontrolled growth; invasion and destruction of adjacent normal tissues — in this case, ecosystems; metastasis, which means distant colonization; and dedifferentiation, which you see very well in the patterns of cities.

Salon.com

I don’t want to believe this. We know the universe is ultimately tending to random disorder. Somehow, physical forces are able to buck this trend and create small pockets of order like stars, planets, solar systems, and complex chemical compounds. And then on only one planet that we know of in all the universe, something called life has arisen from these chemical compounds, which has an extraordinary ability to construct ordered systems in our random universe. And then in only one species we know of in all the universe, something called intelligence has arisen from that life with the ability to create hitherto unimagined complex ordered systems. I don’t want to believe that this process has come to its conclusion and that the conclusion is one that ends the entire forward progression forever. Of course, if we are not the only intelligent life in the universe and if intelligent life is in fact common, then the situation looks much less bleak. Our particular malignant form of intelligent life can destroy its host and thus itself, and in fact this can happen in the vast majority of cases, but somebody somewhere can carrying on with the project of creating order and beauty in a cold indifferent universe. This, in my view, is the meaning and purpose of life. It just isn’t looking at the moment like we will be the ones to do it. And if in defiance of all reason we are the only intelligent life that has arisen or ever will arrive in the universe, then the future is an eternity of cold indifference, and we will be the ones who blew it.

what’s new with cancer?

Leave a reply

This article is critical of the focus on new treatments for cancer, saying prevention should be more of a focus.

Up to 40% of cancers could be prevented by reducing the consumption of highly processed foods, high-calorie diets, and certain fats, increasing consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables, and getting people to be more physically active. Alcohol consumption increases the risk of several types of cancer and accounts for 19,500 cancer deaths a year. Air pollution is a major cause of lung cancer and may also increase bladder and breast cancer. And one study found that pollution in U.S. drinking water could have caused 100,000 cancer cases between 2010 and 2017…

The human costs of allowing businesses rather than scientists and doctors to shape cancer research are high. By pursuing cancer treatment options that are the most profitable rather than the most effective for the largest number of people, the medical enterprise misses opportunities to make more substantial progress…

By proposing additional measures to make prevention the priority, tackle commercial determinants of cancer, and avoid the technological quick fix suggested by war and moonshot metaphors, those seeking to reduce the burden of cancer can develop more effective and equitable approaches.

STAT

I had the impression that, smoking, air pollution, and lack of sunscreen aside (okay, those are actually three big ones), the causes of cancer were still murky, with a suspected role for various chemicals in consumer products, food, water, and the environment, but not much known for sure and luck still playing a big role. This article seems to suggest a lot more is known about the causes of cancer than I thought. That big business has captured and corrupted our government is not news, however.

November 2018 in Review

Leave a reply

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • Coral reefs are expected to decline 70-90% by mid-century.
  • The U.S. stock market is overvalued by about 40% by historic measures, and some economists think a major recession may be looming.
  • About half a million people have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan since the U.S. invasions starting in 2001. This includes only people killed directly by violence, not disease, hunger, thirst, etc.

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • New tech roundup: People in Sweden are barely using cash at all, and some are paying with microchips embedded in their fingers. New technology may allow screening of multiple airport passengers from 25 feet away with minimal disruption. This is great for airline passengers who are already expecting to be screened intrusively, but of course raises some concerns about potential uses elsewhere in the public realm. Amazon is hiring about 100,000 seasonal workers this year, compared to about 120,000 in past years, and the difference may be explained by automation. There is a new ISO standard for toilets not connected to sewers systems (and not just your grandfather’s septic tank.)
  • A unidentified flying object has been spotted in our solar system, and serious scientists say there is at least a plausible, if very unlikely, chance that it is an alien spacecraft.
  • People are taking micro doses of LSD on a daily basis, believing it boosts creativity, and there is some evidence for this although the science is not rigorous.

cancer and immunotherapy

1 Reply

The Washington Post has an article about a new cancer treatment.

When a patient is treated under the Novartis process, T cells are extracted from a patient’s blood, frozen and sent to the company’s plant in Morris Plains, N.J. There, the cells are genetically modified to attack the cancer, expanded in number, refrozen and shipped back to the patient for infusion.

Once inside the body, the cells multiply exponentially and go hunting for the CD19 protein, which appears on a kind of white blood cell that can give rise to diseases, such as leukemia and lymphoma. The turnaround time for manufacturing the therapy, called “vein-to-vein” time, will be an estimated 22 days, Novartis officials told the committee Wednesday.

From the start of Wednesday’s meeting, committee members made clear that they were not concerned about the treatment’s efficacy, which has been well established — 83 percent of patients went into remission in the pivotal Novartis trial.

 

more on the new cancer treatments

1 Reply

The BBC has a bit more on the leading edge in cancer research and treatment:

Cancer is entering a “new era” of personalised medicine with drugs targeted to the specific weaknesses in each patient’s tumour, say doctors…

The idea of precision medicine is to test every patient’s tumour, find the mutations that have become essential for it to survive and then select a targeted drug to counter-act the mutation – killing the tumour…

a revolution in genetics – allowing scientists to rapidly and cheaply interrogate a cancer’s corrupted DNA – is leading to huge excitement about a new generation of precision drugs.

“the new war on cancer”

1 Reply

I remember that one of the (few) things that caught my attention in the last State of the Union address was talk of a new research plan to cure cancer. This article in The Week talks about what that is.

recently, researchers have had very encouraging results with a new approach called immunotherapy. Some patients in advanced stages of the disease, who previously would have been deemed terminal, have undergone rapid and complete recoveries. Hoping to build on that progress, President Obama in January announced a $1 billion “moonshot” to cure cancer, putting Vice President Joe Biden — whose son Beau died of brain cancer last year — in charge of “mission control.” …

Another promising new frontier is genetic analysis, which splits each type of cancer into dozens of subtypes, so that specific chemotherapy drugs can be tailored to each cancer. Experts also now hope they can use the breakthrough gene-editing technique called CRISPR to correct mutations in cancer cells, or perhaps “edit” out mutation-prone genes that people inherit…

In August 2015, former President Jimmy Carter announced he had been diagnosed with advanced melanoma, a type of skin cancer that had spread to his liver and brain. “I’m perfectly at ease with whatever comes,” said Carter, then 90. Four months later, Carter announced he was cancer-free. Along with radiation, Carter had been put on pembrolizumab (brand name Keytruda), a checkpoint inhibitor that stops cancer cells from blocking the immune system’s response. Soon after, Carter’s scans showed no evidence of the original cancer lesions on his brain, or any new lesions. Given that cancer can often reappear years down the line, oncologists prefer to talk in terms of “years of remission” rather than “cure” — but like Carter, some cancer patients on Keytruda have seen their disease disappear completely. Not surprisingly, says melanoma specialist Dr. Patrick Ott, Carter’s miraculous recovery has prompted patients across the country to demand, “I want what Jimmy Carter had.” Doctors caution that in clinical trials, Keytruda shrank the tumors in only 24 percent of patients, and that it only works on certain types of cancer.

elephants don’t get cancer

Leave a reply

Elephants don’t get cancer. Well, they do, but nowhere near the rates that humans do. There are a few theories – they have better genetic defenses against cancer, they don’t have bad habits like smoking and obesity, and they reproduce throughout their life spans so that evolution selects for traits that keep them healthy late in life. Which reminds me of the weird science fact that humans and two types of whales are the only animals on earth that go through menopause.

chemicals and cancer

1 Reply

I’ve tended not to obsess over chemicals and cancer, because I think there are other risks that are much higher and much more clearly proven (like the high odds of death every time you set foot in or anywhere near a motor vehicle, to give one example.) I also tend to accept some chemicals, like water disinfectants, food preservatives, drugs, even pesticides, as somewhat necessary evils – we actually know they have a downside, but they do more good than harm on balance. In a sense, it is a “luxury” that many of us avoid violence and infectious diseases long enough to get old and die of cancer. Cancer is at least to some extent a random phenomenon. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be looking for safer alternatives to these chemicals that do the same good. If we don’t look we won’t find them. And then, there are chemicals that are known to be harmful, and have no positive effects. Triclosan comes to mind. The companies using cynical fear-based marketing to force these on people should be punished.

All that aside, our food, water, air, and consumer products are full of chemicals, with the result that our bodies are full of chemicals. We don’t have good information on what most of them are doing to us, and especially what combinations of them may be doing to us. Here’s an interesting article that estimates what fraction of cancers are caused by chemicals in the environment, as opposed to lifestyle choices, genetics, and plain old bad luck.

Assessing the carcinogenic potential of low-dose exposures to chemical mixtures in the environment: the challenge ahead

Lifestyle factors are responsible for a considerable portion of cancer incidence worldwide, but credible estimates from the World Health Organization and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) suggest that the fraction of cancers attributable to toxic environmental exposures is between 7% and 19%. To explore the hypothesis that low-dose exposures to mixtures of chemicals in the environment may be combining to contribute to environmental carcinogenesis, we reviewed 11 hallmark phenotypes of cancer, multiple priority target sites for disruption in each area and prototypical chemical disruptors for all targets, this included dose-response characterizations, evidence of low-dose effects and cross-hallmark effects for all targets and chemicals. In total, 85 examples of chemicals were reviewed for actions on key pathways/mechanisms related to carcinogenesis. Only 15% (13/85) were found to have evidence of a dose-response threshold, whereas 59% (50/85) exerted low-dose effects. No dose-response information was found for the remaining 26% (22/85). Our analysis suggests that the cumulative effects of individual (non-carcinogenic) chemicals acting on different pathways, and a variety of related systems, organs, tissues and cells could plausibly conspire to produce carcinogenic synergies. Additional basic research on carcinogenesis and research focused on low-dose effects of chemical mixtures needs to be rigorously pursued before the merits of this hypothesis can be further advanced. However, the structure of the World Health Organization International Programme on Chemical Safety ‘Mode of Action’ framework should be revisited as it has inherent weaknesses that are not fully aligned with our current understanding of cancer biology.