Posted on 06/27/2007 10:57:15 PM PDT by GodGunsGuts
Thirty-six years into the war on cancer, scientists have not only failed to come up with a cure, but most of the newer drugs suffer from the same problems as those available in the pre-war days: serious toxicity, limited effectiveness and eventual resistance.
This is no surprise to University of California, Berkeley, genetics researcher Peter Duesberg, professor of molecular and cell biology. According to his novel yet controversial "chromosomal" theory of cancer, which is receiving increased attention among cancer researchers, each cancer is unique, and there is no magic bullet.
"The mutation theory of cancer says that a limited number of genes causes cancer, so cancers should all be more or less the same," Duesberg said. The chromosomal theory, which he laid out in an article in the May 2007 issue of Scientific American, implies instead that, "even if cancers are from the same tissue, and are generated with the same carcinogen, they are never the same. There is always a cytogenetic and a biochemical individuality in every cancer."
The most that can be expected from a drug, he said, is that it is less toxic to normal cells than cancer cells, and that as a result a cancer detected early can be knocked back by chemotherapy. His chromosomal theory offers hope of early detection, however, since it ascribes cancer to chromosomal disruption, called aneuploidy, that can be seen easily through a microscope...
(Excerpt) Read more at physorg.com ...
Coffee enemas cure AIDS placemark.
You’re on the wrong discussion board. You’re looking for WeGotTheCauseOfAIDSWrong.com: moderator Robert Gallo.
I don’t give a crap about anyone’s theories. Cancer and watching a loved one die because nothing works is a living hell.
==I don’t give a crap about anyone’s theories. Cancer and watching a loved one die because nothing works is a living hell.
Hopefully, someday the theories will turn into genuine treatments, or even a cure. Until then, the more competition the better.
The regulations limiting human exposure to low-level radiation are not known to have prevented a single health effect in anyone despite decades of use. But they have cost more than $1 trillion in the U.S. alone, according to Radiation, Science and Health, an international non-profit group run by radiation experts who “advocate for the objective review of low-level radiation science policies.”Guesswork about the alleged risk posed by low-level radiation is only part of the problem with the National Academy of Sciences report.
Over the last 30 years or so, the scientific establishment has become heavily invested in the notion that cancers are caused by genetic, or DNA mutations. The idea is that something — say a single molecule of a “cancer-causing” chemical, the smallest radiation exposure or even chance alone — can cause a change or mutation in a cell’s DNA, thereby turning a normal cell into a cancer cell.
In addition to regulation of radiation exposures, this supposition is the basic rationale that government regulators have relied on for decades to regulate exposures to chemicals allegedly linked with cancer risk — even though there is virtually no real-world evidence to support it.
But a new idea spotlighted by Tom Bethell in the July/August issue of the American Spectator should cause regulators to begin to re-think their decades-old-but-still-unproven assumption of gene mutation.
It was first noticed about a century ago that cancer cells exhibit “aneuploidy” — they don’t have the correct number of chromosomes. Aneuploidy occurs when cells divide improperly and a daughter cell winds up with an extra chromosome. An aneuploid cell may die, but it may also survive and repeat the error, perhaps eventually leading to cancer.
The problem with this idea is not so much scientific as political. Bethell points out that the man who “rediscovered” the old work on aneuploidy is controversial University of California-Berkeley researcher and National Academy of Sciences member Peter Duesberg, who famously had his grants from the National Institutes of Health cut off for being critical of the direction of AIDS research in the late 1980s.
Duesberg still isn’t getting any NIH money even though his aneuploidy idea has survived early challenges, according to Bethell’s article, and the older notions of cancer development are going nowhere fast.
It seems that before regulators spend another $1 trillion of the public’s money on radiation protection that may be based on faulty assumptions, someone ought to throw some research money Duesberg’s way.
Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and CSRwatch.com, is adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and is the author of Junk Science Judo: Self-defense Against Health Scares and Scams (Cato Institute, 2001).
Great find!
Great post...it’s always nice to meet yet a new person who dares to challenge the Church of Darwin!
Wow, that's weak, embarrassingly weak
Very interesting - too bad my wife died from cancer four years ago, too early to benefit from this discovery (if it eventually proves correct).
Very sorry for your loss. The way I see it, especially in so far as cancer is concerned, the more competition amongst scientists the better.
Your comments would be very funny if they weren’t so tragic. When you goofballs get around to curing cancer with prayers to your pagan natural selection god, LET US KNOW!
No he hasn't, because the "neo-Darwinist fixation on gene mutation" you're babbling about does not exist. The modern synthesis of evolutionary biology has for many decades included far more mechanisms of genetic variation than just "gene mutation", including gene duplication, chromosome duplication, indels, transposable elements, and on and on.
Please, take the time to actually learn something about evolutionary biology before you attempt to critique it. You keep making ridiculously elementary mistakes in your various claims on these threads, borne of your almost complete ignorance of the topic you're so lamely struggling to attack.
The article does nothing to support "ID", nor support your goofy claim that "Darwinism hinders the War on Cancer". But hey, don't let reality get in the way of your wild-eyed rants...
If you actually knew anything about evolutionoary biology, beyond the twaddle that the creationist websites have been spewing as propaganda, you'd have been able to realize that a) the study of cancer development is already critically grounded in evolutionary biology, because pre-cancerous cells literally evolve into cancer via the mechanisms of Darwinian evolution (thus making your claim that "Darwinism hinders the war on cancer" not only false, but 180 degrees divorced from the true situation),and b) the article itself both reiterates what was *already* known about cancer (i.e., that it often involves chromosomal abnormalities), *and* overstates the case (because many oncogenes -- individual genes which when directly mutated in isolation are involved in many kinds of cancer -- have already been identified and studied, contradicting your source's overblown claim that cancer is "always" due to chromosomal abnormalities and not just gene mutation).
Care to try again when you actually have a clue what in the hell you're talking about?
Here, try to get the barest beginnings of an education on the topic -- the following are from Chapter 23 of Molecular Biology of the Cell, 4th ed., by Alberts et al, published in 2002 (and already discuss the kinds of chromosomal abnormalities Duesberg is trying to make sound like a "new" idea):
Cancer
Cancer as a Microevolutionary Process
The Preventable Causes of Cancer
Finding the Cancer-Critical Genes
The Molecular Basis of Cancer-Cell Behavior
Cancer Treatment: Present and Future
References
Read that chapter, and you'll begin to understand that not only does "Darwinism" not "hinder" an understanding of cancer and its treatment, it is *critical* to that understanding. From the chapter's summary:
Cancer cells, by definition, proliferate in defiance of normal controls (that is, they are neoplastic) and are able to invade and colonize surrounding tissues (that is, they are malignant). By giving rise to secondary tumors, or metastases, they become difficult to eradicate surgically. Most cancers are thought to originate from a single cell that has experienced an initial mutation, but the progeny of this cell must undergo further changes, requiring numerous additional mutations, to become cancerous. This phenomenon of tumor progression, which usually takes many years, reflects the unfortunate operation of evolution by mutation and natural selection among somatic cells.The rational treatment of cancer requires an understanding of the special properties that cancer cells acquire as they evolve, multiply, and spread. These special properties include alterations in cell signaling pathways, enabling the cells in a tumor to ignore the signals from their environment that normally keep cell proliferation under tight control. In this way, the cells are first able to proliferate abnormally in their original tissue and then to metastasize, surviving and proliferating in foreign tissues. As part of the evolutionary process of tumor progression, cancer cells also acquire an abnormal aversion to suicide, and they avoid or break free of programmed limitations to proliferation -- including replicative senescence and the normal pathways of differentiation that would otherwise hamper their ability to grow and divide.
Look, if you can't do any better than that, don't even bother. Leave the science discussions for someone who actually knows the topic, and isn't so whacked-out that they think evolutionary biology is about "prayers to a pagan natural selection god".
You're *way* out of your depth in science discussions, you don't even understand what it's about.
1. Chromosomal rearrangements are a form of mutation. A common one is for a segment of a chromosome to “flip,” the result being called an inversion.
2. Use of the word “Darwinism” is an attempt to use understanding of evolutionary science as a perjorative and does not further the discussion.
3. Assuming that understanding evolutionary science preludes believing in God is insulting and superficial. It is more accurate to say that a small mumber of Biblical Literalists who worship the current translations of a Book rather than God and who don’t have much grounding in evolutionary science don’t understand those of us who are both religious and scientifically literate in this area.
“...it ascribes cancer to chromosomal disruption, called aneuploidy, that can be seen easily through a microscope...”
The same kind of testing now being done for a wide variety of illnesses that never used to be regarded as helpful. I also wait for the day when scientists understand how bacteria and viruses affect us at the cellular level.
HIV is a retrovirus. It effectively clones itself into the host DNA in a cell.
It is possible to be infected yet have no antibodies for it.
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