Posted: Jun 14, 2012 12:19 am
DavidMcC wrote:CharlieM wrote:“Cancer is no more a disease of cells than a traffic jam is a disease of cars
BS! Cancer is essentially a failure of the cell to respond to apoptosis signals, like FADD. Phosphorylation of FADD causes it to fail to precipitate cell death, leading to uncontrolled cell division and growth, ie, cancer.
http://www.nature.com/bjc/journal/v94/n4/full/6602955a.html
Well some experts, even unabashed geneticists, who study these things day in and day out, think we have to look beyond the cell to understand cancer:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/29/healt ... wanted=all
Mina Bissell will never forget the reception she got from a prominent scientist visiting Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she worked. She gave him a paper she had just published on the genesis of cancer.
“He took the paper and held it over the wastebasket and said, ‘What do you want me to do with it?’ Then he dropped it in.”
That was 20 years ago, and ever since, Dr. Bissell and a few others have struggled for acceptance of what seemed a radical idea: Gene mutations are part of the process of cancer, but mutations alone are not enough. Cancer involves an interaction between rogue cells and surrounding tissue...
The basic idea — still in the experimental stages — is that cancer cells cannot turn into a lethal tumor without the cooperation of other cells nearby. That may be why autopsies repeatedly find that most people who die of causes other than cancer have at least some tiny tumors in their bodies that had gone unnoticed. According to current thinking, the tumors were kept in check, causing no harm...
The researchers are cautious. They, more than anyone else, know the blind alleys of cancer research over the past few decades. And no one is suggesting that controlling a tumor’s environment will, by itself, cure cancer.
And they are not discounting cancer-causing genes. But even some who have made their careers studying cancer genes say a tumor’s environment can no longer be ignored.
“I am an unabashed cancer geneticist,” said Dr. Bert Vogelstein, director of the Ludwig Center for Cancer Genetics and Therapeutics at Johns Hopkins. “The genetic alterations in the cancer cells are the proximate cause of the malignancy.”
But, Dr. Vogelstein said, “one cannot fully understand that disease unless one understands” the tumor’s environment.