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Posted on 08/15/2011 8:35:22 PM PDT by neverdem
For the last decade cancer research has been guided by a common vision of how a single cell, outcompeting its neighbors, evolves into a malignant tumor.
Through a series of random mutations, genes that encourage cellular division are pushed into overdrive, while genes that normally send growth-restraining signals are taken offline.
With the accelerator floored and the brake lines cut, the cell and its progeny are free to rapidly multiply. More mutations accumulate, allowing the cancer cells to elude other safeguards and to invade neighboring tissue and metastasize.
These basic principles — laid out 11 years ago in a landmark paper, “The Hallmarks of Cancer,” by Douglas Hanahan and Robert A. Weinberg, and revisited in a follow-up article this year — still serve as the reigning paradigm, a kind of Big Bang theory for the field.
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...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Perhaps we should remind ourselves of how many billions go into “shrimp on treadmills,” climate change, innumerable “art-f*rt” waste-ola, etc., when we might better direct our funding to folks with a real education and real accomplishments who actually have a non-zero chance of improving the human condition.
More bucks to cancer research would be nice.
And spend a few extra bucks to shoot those arts idiots who insist on covering bridges, etc with sheets and other examples of their non talent.
Amen! It burns me to no end that a disease that is not in the top 10 killers in this country receives most of the research dollars(AIDS) while 2 diseases that ARE in the top 10 killers, cancer and diabetes, receive a fraction of those dollars
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.
Sounds a little like a certain type of hacking attack.
I just got an invitation for our organization to participate in ‘portraying homelessness in art.’ Haha. We do music, so unfortunately we won’t be able to participate. But if we could, we wouldn’t. Let’s see — Michelangelo vs ‘homelessness’ — which portrays real beauty??
You may possibly have posted to the wrong thread.
And why do suppose that is?
Also one of the most preventable--just don't do IV drugs and keep your zipper up.
Oops. Sorry. I see the connection. My bad.
It's a little bit like using the manned space program as a way to funnel lots of money into technologies that could be used by the military for satellite communications, re-entry vehicles, precision guidance, miniaturized electronics, etc.
Because we know that the 2% encodes enzymes and proteins.
Same basic principle as why a drunk looks for his keys under the streetlight.
So scientists are like drunks? And obsessive ones at that.
Kinda surprised to see this come out of the Times. It actually carries an air of objectivity.
True enough...and let’s not overlook the debilitating auto-immune disorders.
*shrug* They’re both human...
Yeah but drunks don't come begging to the government for money. ...
Oops, at least they didn't a while back.
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Sure. Rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn's disease, Lupus, MS, diabetes, etc.
The Times has a very good science section as long as it doesn't involve politics. I try to check them at least once a week. I think this writer is new. I didn't recognize his name. This story is for their Science Tuesday section.
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