What we don't know is a lot. Anybody who says otherwise doesn't know what they don't know, or something like that.
Great article in today's NYT:
Cance and Genes
But recent discoveries have been complicating the picture with tangles of new detail. Cancer appears to be even more willful and calculating than previously imagined.
Most DNA, for example, was long considered junk — a netherworld of detritus that had no important role in cancer or anything else. Only about 2 percent of the human genome carries the code for making enzymes and other proteins, the cogs and scaffolding of the machinery that a cancer cell turns to its own devices.
These days “junk” DNA is referred to more respectfully as “noncoding” DNA, and researchers are finding clues that “pseudogenes” lurking within this dark region may play a role in cancer.
“We’ve been obsessively focusing our attention on 2 percent of the genome,” said Dr. Pier Paolo Pandolfi, a professor of medicine and pathology at Harvard Medical School. This spring, at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in Orlando, Fla., he described a new “biological dimension” in which signals coming from both regions of the genome participate in the delicate balance between normal cellular behavior and malignancy.
As they look beyond the genome, cancer researchers are also awakening to the fact that some 90 percent of the protein-encoding cells in our body are microbes. We evolved with them in a symbiotic relationship, which raises the question of just who is occupying whom.
“We are massively outnumbered,” said Jeremy K. Nicholson, chairman of biological chemistry and head of the department of surgery and cancer at Imperial College London. Altogether, he said, 99 percent of the functional genes in the body are microbial.
In Orlando, he and other researchers described how genes in this microbiome — exchanging messages with genes inside human cells — may be involved with cancers of the colon, stomach, esophagus and other organs.
These shifts in perspective, occurring throughout cellular biology, can seem as dizzying as what happened in cosmology with the discovery that dark matter and dark energy make up most of the universe: Background suddenly becomes foreground and issues once thought settled are up in the air. In cosmology the Big Bang theory emerged from the confusion in a stronger but more convoluted form. The same may be happening with the science of cancer.
So, in related science stories, there are scientist who are looking at how man and intestinal worm have evolved together (evolved may not be the right word). Eradicating intestinal worms has resulted in an increase in bowel problems (ulcerative colitis and Chrone's, iirc); also could play a role in the increase in allergies. Also, the bacteria and microbes in our guts and intestine interact in a very complex way with milk; colonic cleansing is harmful because it removes beneficial microbes from our intestines; too much use of anti-bacterial hand soap is bad because it removes beneficial bacteria from our skin. And so on and so forth.
So, the meta-point here that I'm gathering from more and more of these types of articles is that we can't separate ourselves from our environment, specifically the microbes that inhabit our body.
Background has indeed become foreground.
I think there are Nobel prizes to be won in this area.
Great article in today's NYT:
Cance and Genes
But recent discoveries have been complicating the picture with tangles of new detail. Cancer appears to be even more willful and calculating than previously imagined.
Most DNA, for example, was long considered junk — a netherworld of detritus that had no important role in cancer or anything else. Only about 2 percent of the human genome carries the code for making enzymes and other proteins, the cogs and scaffolding of the machinery that a cancer cell turns to its own devices.
These days “junk” DNA is referred to more respectfully as “noncoding” DNA, and researchers are finding clues that “pseudogenes” lurking within this dark region may play a role in cancer.
“We’ve been obsessively focusing our attention on 2 percent of the genome,” said Dr. Pier Paolo Pandolfi, a professor of medicine and pathology at Harvard Medical School. This spring, at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in Orlando, Fla., he described a new “biological dimension” in which signals coming from both regions of the genome participate in the delicate balance between normal cellular behavior and malignancy.
As they look beyond the genome, cancer researchers are also awakening to the fact that some 90 percent of the protein-encoding cells in our body are microbes. We evolved with them in a symbiotic relationship, which raises the question of just who is occupying whom.
“We are massively outnumbered,” said Jeremy K. Nicholson, chairman of biological chemistry and head of the department of surgery and cancer at Imperial College London. Altogether, he said, 99 percent of the functional genes in the body are microbial.
In Orlando, he and other researchers described how genes in this microbiome — exchanging messages with genes inside human cells — may be involved with cancers of the colon, stomach, esophagus and other organs.
These shifts in perspective, occurring throughout cellular biology, can seem as dizzying as what happened in cosmology with the discovery that dark matter and dark energy make up most of the universe: Background suddenly becomes foreground and issues once thought settled are up in the air. In cosmology the Big Bang theory emerged from the confusion in a stronger but more convoluted form. The same may be happening with the science of cancer.
So, in related science stories, there are scientist who are looking at how man and intestinal worm have evolved together (evolved may not be the right word). Eradicating intestinal worms has resulted in an increase in bowel problems (ulcerative colitis and Chrone's, iirc); also could play a role in the increase in allergies. Also, the bacteria and microbes in our guts and intestine interact in a very complex way with milk; colonic cleansing is harmful because it removes beneficial microbes from our intestines; too much use of anti-bacterial hand soap is bad because it removes beneficial bacteria from our skin. And so on and so forth.
So, the meta-point here that I'm gathering from more and more of these types of articles is that we can't separate ourselves from our environment, specifically the microbes that inhabit our body.
Background has indeed become foreground.
I think there are Nobel prizes to be won in this area.
