Hacker News Reader

Comment by jostmey | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if he was somehow unknowingly, inadvertently exposed to the trigger in lab that caused the cascade of events leading to runaway cell division. He was, after all, working in a lab studying Leukemia, and he probably worked with Leukemia cell lines a lot. Of course, there is no way to really know how he contracted the cancer, but it is intriguing to wonder about such things.

View on HN

That's extremely unlikely. Working with cancer cell lines will not give you cancer - it's non-transmissable. (with the exception of Tasmanian Devils, and one recorded case of maternal -> fetus transmission).

The cancer that he had was clearly his own, as evidenced by the fact that they were able to match up his normal genome with the tumor genome and find the handful of differences that were driving the cancer.

*Full disclosure: I work in the Genome Institute at WashU, where this sequencing was done, and while I did not work on this particular case, this sort of cancer genomics project is what I work on all day long.

As chrisamiller says, cancer is generally not transmissible. One of the reasons cancer is so insidious is that a tumor is made up of the patient's own cells. Foreign cells, on the other hand, can generally be readily detected and destroyed by the immune system.

The reason tasmanian devils can transmit cancer is that they're not genetically diverse enough to differentiate foreign cells from their own cells. But that's the exception that proves the rule: tasmanian devils are unusual in that they went through recent population bottlenecks that dramatically reduced their genetic diversity.

This paper's title says he studied mouse leukemia, but does anybody have a link to the human leukemia paper?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3069786/

To the best of my knowledge, this hasn't been published.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com