James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA’s double-helix structure recently called for a back to basics approach in dealing with cancer.  In previous post threads I’ve discussed cancer’s complexity and in particular the confounding and scary implications of somatic evolution, which underscores...

Michael Pollan, as always, making perfect sense: Now watch Will Allen on urban...

This is a very complex topic, as the following talk suggests: The main takeaways from this that I got are: Cancers for which sunlight deficit is a risk factor are orders of magnitude more prevalent than the few for which overexposure is a risk factor. People who are using sunscreen regularly are precisely...

My second cancer post in a row.  Rafe must have made my news antennae more sensitive to the issue. The Broad Institute announced that they have identified a compound that kills breast cancer stem cells: salinomycin.  What’s particularly cool is the way they went about it.  Evidently, cancer stem...

I saw this brief New York Times article syndicated in the San Jose Mercury News.  Evidently, one of the challenges in identifying new cancer treatments is recruiting enough patients for drug trials.  The issue is that oncologists have little incentive to encourage their patients to enroll in drug...

This is not my meditation, it was created by Cellucidate: ...

Heng, et al recently published a review paper that brings together and touches on many different aspects of cancer complexity.  I thought this an opportunity to selectively quote the paper and organize the quotes loosely around various complex systems concepts they relate to.  I’m curious whether...

1. Smile. 2. Spend time with friends, or even try and make a new one. 3. Help another person. Donate a small amount of money, that has nominal value to you, but significant value to someone else. (Kiva, Vittana Foundation.) 4. Quit Smoking. It might be even worse for you today. 5. Stop worrying about...

Dendreon has developed two interesting avenues in the fight against prostate cancer. The first is a therapeutic vaccine that in just released Phase 3 study results increased survival time by 4 months. The second is a small molecule that induces apoptosis in prostate cancer cells. ...

Despite hundreds of billions of dollars appropriated for cancer research, as well as the efforts of thousands of the world’s best minds, progress in preventing or curing cancer has been almost non-existent. I find this unacceptable. We should be doing better. We need to be doing better. So what’s...

Yesterday, from the Director of the National Cancer Institute, addressing one of the two largest cancer research conferences of the year: NCI commenced a series of workshops that began to bring aspects of the physical sciences to the problem of cancer. We discussed how physical laws governing short-range and...

This is not news, health professionals of all sorts have been saying this for a long time.  ABC News features a recent study supporting this. A relevant footnote near the end of the article though: ...

On the Cancer Complexity forum, I pose a question: if we could somehow replace all the damaged DNA in each of the cells of your body with an undamaged copy on a continuous basis, would that prevent you from getting cancer? What do you...

Here is the scariest image in all of cancer: Graph from Fortune Magazine article. ...

Thanks to Daniel Horowitz for alerting me to third-hand smoke.  I guess then if you pass on epigentic mutations to your children from third-hand smoke exposure it’s called fourth-hand...

Click here to read part 4 in this series. As 2008 closes, it appears that momentum is picking up for the somatic evolution view of cancer.  Here are three recently published papers of note: The Evolution of Cancer (Goymer, et al, Aug 2008, Nature) Cancer Research Meets Evolutionary Biology (Pepper, et al,...

For those who missed the first three parts: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Any underlying theme of this thread is how reliance on reductionism causes us to miss the key invisible etiologies that are necessary to make progress on understanding, treating, detecting and preventing cancer. In the first three parts of...

An incidentaloma according to wikipedia is “a tumor (-oma) found by coincidence (incidental) without clinical symptoms or suspicion.”  The provocative NY Times article below suggests that indolent tumors (i.e. ones that do not need treatment) may come and go as a normal part of life.  With...

The following is a recent paper by Henry Heng published in JAMA.  I’ve linked concepts mentioned in the paper to corresponding explications from this blog. JAMA. 2008;300(13):1580-1581. The Conflict Between Complex Systems and Reductionism Henry H. Q. Heng, PhD Author Affiliations: Center for...

[ I'm asking for your help in answering this question, read past the fold to see how ] In my post on invisible etiology, I challenged us all to be as open-minded as possible when dealing with our most complex problems, for this is the only way to make the invisible become visible.  Here’s where I...

Kevin points out that perhaps I am giving chemotherapy short shrift and not looking at the bigger picture.  I would counter that you can’t really make the latency analogy with human life because we are all born terminal.  “Mean survival time” is a squirrely measure at best because how do...

When I posted part 1, I didn’t realize that Scientific American would be coming out with an entire special issue devoted to cancer in the same month, including an article by Carl Zimmer entitled “Evolved for Cancer?“. I had hoped that the article would be about the somatic evolution of...

For anyone interested in learning about the complexity of cancer, I’d like to invite you to check out a forum I started a while ago (but only recently made public) called Cancer Complexity. One of the main themes (but not the only one) in Cancer Complexity is the notion that cancer is an evolutionary...

Pop Quiz: Which is a bigger determinant of cancer mortality in America, being poor or being black? According to Dr. Harold Freeman of the National Cancer Institute, poverty is the bigger factor today, but it hasn’t always been so: ...

Many people would admit to not understanding cancer well, but fewer people would admit to not understanding evolution well.  Here are some challenges to our understanding of both. Starvation may help cancer treatment. “As little as 48 hours of starvation afforded mice injected with brain cancer cells...