Comment by ItsMe000001 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ItsMe000001 | Hacker News Reader

When we developed antibiotics we thought we solved the problem. Now we are looking at more and more strains of bacteria resistant to all we got. We have to keep going, turns out we are not done developing antibiotics, forever.

So, as I see it, this might show that once we "cured cancer" (I know, there is not "one cancer", and that there won't be that one drug, it's more a dynamic equilibrium), when we think we made it we might find out that the threat develops too and cancerous cells may come up with completely new ideas. Red Queen hypothesis, in a way. I know the article says they have not seen any such thing in humans, but when we developed antibiotics the ones we see now weren't there either.

A little OT:

The new public release version of that new cancer like thing will be open source, as always, and also as always that is of little use because the code is a mess and deciphering it takes as much time as writing it new from scratch... on the other hand, whenever I looked at source code of major projects it reminded me a lot of what biological processes would come up with, just as messy, you can only patch the immediate problem, probably introducing 10 new ones in the process. Especially when they rely on automated testing to replace understanding - patches that pass the tests are accepted (keep fiddling until they do), until nobody understands the code any more a hundred developers and years later.

Sometimes software developers ask what new programming language to learn for self-improvement. Inevitably a lot of languages from Haskell to Python to whatever are mentioned. I think that's all aiming way too close to what those people already know. I would recommend - biology and neuroscience! It's easy and free these days, e.g. "Introduction to Biology" on edX, "Medical Neuroscience" on Coursera after the fundamentals from Harvard at https://www.mcb80x.org/ - plus probability and statistics (edX, Coursera - many very good courses).

Only some random musings triggered by reading that article.

Unlike bacteria, cancer must evolve "fresh" in each new host that it develops in. As a result, a cancer treatment that works today will work about as well in the future.

You might need to factor in juvenile cancers or Baldwinian evolution.

> “We then realized they were a near perfect match to the cells of another species, the pullet shell.” The cells must have originated there before jumping into the golden carpets. > > Oddly, the pullet shells themselves show no signs of the cancer. They may have given rise to it, but they no longer suffer from it. Why? “One could imagine that the species-of-origin is now resistant to the tumor,” says Goff, “but we don’t know that.”

I suppose it's possible that one species could have evolved to develop and spread cancers that are more transmissible to some competing species than to itself. In that sense there could be some long-term evolution going on.

Isn't that how agrobacterium works?

Is cancer just an inevitable threshold one must reach on long enough timeline, due to entropy?

Given sufficient time, everything becomes inevitable.

only in a closed/ergodic environment.

What does "everything" mean in this sentence? Even things that are not allowed by the "model" of the universe?

The universe was created from nothingness, so yes.

Everything can tunnel, so on the scale of "truly silly times," the particles in your body might someday get back together for a reunion.

Including closed loops?

Yes, basically. Cancer is at heart localized evolution, and there are many, many pathways which can provide survival or reproductive advantages to cells or tissue if they become dysfunctional.

Entropy never comes into it because we are not talking about a closed system. So long as a creature can eat food, or synthesize it from the sun's rays, they are an open system taking in substances that give it fresh energy.

You could model this a few ways. You could say a creature exports its entropy by eating food, or you could say, more accurately, that the entropy was created when the energy was stored in chemical form in whatever substances the creature eats.

If there was some ultimate limit on the ability of creatures to communicate information forward then the aging process would apply to the entire species, to life itself, rather than to individual organisms.

You can think of yourself as an organism that was created a few years ago by your mother and father, but as a chemical process, you are 4 billion years old, give or take a few hundred million years. There has not been a single second, in the last 4 billion years, when the chemical reaction that is you was not working to propagate itself forward. If entropy applied to you, then surely you would not have lasted 4 billion years?

I'm not a doctor, but I believe cancer is what we call it when cells that evade apoptosis proliferate to reach a critical mass. They metasttisize when they are able to survive a journey through the blood or lymph systems to invade other foreign tissues for food.

I don't believe it's necessarily due to entropy but the process by which cellular division takes place involves a copying of the host cell's DNA and that copying process is not 100% perfect. It is remarkalably accurate, but given enough time, even with all the systems in place to mitigate and repair errors, they will occur. Most will simply cause that mutated cell to die but it's similar to the 100 monkeys on 100 typewriters at scale. Eventually an error will occur that makes a cell immune from apoptosis.

If we look at cancer as simply another organism that's looking to survive, we can't blame them for innovating strategies. They're simply trying to carve their own niche in the world (albeit at our expense). C'est la vie.

‘We are not done developing antibiotics, forever’

This is under the assumption that we won’t find something better/works differently than antibiotics. Some are theorizing that CRISPR-based approaches could potentially disrupt it and bacteria may not be able to adapt to that kind of approach.

Lots of this is speculation of course, but given that antibiotics aren’t that old of an invention, I find it unlikely that they won’t be discarded to the dustbin of history (at least with the definition and methodologies by which they operate now)

Treatment resistance occurs with existing treatments:

https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/research/drug-...

So "the" cure for cancer would already be expected to address that problem.

It is more likely we will discover something that was relatively rare to replace the threat of cancer. A bunch of these new diseases are a result of the fact we keep on making more and more results into medical treatments. The old things that used to kill people are eliminated and there is no more low hanging fruit.

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