Hacker News Reader

Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

I read the article. It says this gene actively promotes apoptosis -- cell death -- in defective cells.

I mean, I guess it would depend on how you are introducing the gene. How many cells it is getting into.

But if it causes defective cells to suicide, why would it matter where the defect is coming from? I don't think we really have a good handle on what causes cancer. I suspect more cancer is due to some infectious agent than is generally believed and we know genetic variations have significant impact on the immune system and its ability to function at all.

View on HN

What the parent means is that in the Tasmanian devils' case it's the cancerous cells of another animal which are transmitted, not some kind of virus or similar that introduces genetic damage in the host. Since the improved/strengthened cell death mechanism introduced by the therapy would only affect your own cells (as the introduced cells wouldn't have the altered genes), there would be no change to the cancerousness of the transmitted cells.

>I mean, I guess it would depend on how you are introducing the gene. How many cells it is getting into.

It's cancer. You're trivializing the ultimate source of the problem. If we could ensure universal targeting of cancer cells, we wouldn't need a technically elaborate method of cellular death, like gene modification.

You might as well suggest solving world hunger by just feeding everyone.

You're trivializing the ultimate source of the problem.

No, I'm not. But it's occurred to me that I'm imagining this as treatment for Tasmanian devils that already have tumors. Maybe other people are envisioning it as a preventative measure.

And maybe that's part of the problem in trying to discuss it.

It is by definition a preventative measure. Otherwise, it's no different then any other cancer treatment in that it has the same fundamental weakness working against it: natural selection.

If the cells knew when they were supposed to die, then it wouldn't be cancer.

If the cure is telling the cells when they're supposed to die, then the cells that don't listen survive, ergo the cancer survives.

Which, in the sense of (non-preventitive) treatment, makes it a problem of universal targeting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com