Thanks for giving me my reading material this week, as someone with stage 4 colon cancer :) I also read about promising outcomes with fenbendazole (dog deworming medicine) and colon/lung cancer, hope these finally unlock the fix for metastasis.
Sorry to hear about the stage 4 prognosis. I know its insanely unlikely, but here's hoping for a quick game changing recovery that will flip the table on your cancer.
Sounds like advanced symbiosis. I wonder if the movement is across a gradient or whether the super organism has a control unit that makes decisions. Are we a result of similar microorganisms?
Many of the stages required to imagine how life went from solo and unicellular, to cooperative unicellular, to specialized unicellular verging on multicellular, to full-specialization unable to survive independently as a single cell, exists in some species or other today.
E.g. Dictyostelium is an amoeba. (Amoebas are not bacteria; they're eukaryotes like animals or fungi -- sexual reproduction and an encased nucleus.) Individual cells can survive independently, hunting for much smaller bacteria and nutrients. But in the presence of many other cells of its species, chemical communication occurs to trigger and guide cell differentiation. Some at the exterior of the cluster change into a protective shell, like skin, or a macro cell-wall. Others specialize into ion transfer between the interior and exterior environment. Some are even triggered to kill themselves during the reproductive phase, providing nutrients to their kin.
It's on the line between multicellular, and not. Parts can float off and re-join. I think something like that was the intermediate stage in the evolution of multicellular life like animals, but there's many other competing hypotheses and none seem to be universally accepted.
I think the answer to your question is probably "yes." I listened to an interesting show on PBS radio 30 Oct. about what happened 2Byo that jump-started evolution. I can't find the show online, which explained in depth, but this short and patronizing video[1] covers the gist of it.
I'm no biologist, but from what I've read: Probably not. A really important fact about multicellular life is that each cell is genetically identical to any other cell in the organism. Otherwise, different cells will start competing with one another, until the relationship falls apart. In nature, symbiosis only works because each cell has an independent means of reproduction, and that always puts a limit to how close the cooperation can be (nothing close to forming multicellular life).
Maybe that statement should come with an explicit topological constraint on the meaning of “inside” the body. Viewed as a donut, gut contents would be considered “outside.”
> In nature, symbiosis only works because each cell has an independent means of reproduction, and that always puts a limit to how close the cooperation can be (nothing close to forming multicellular life)
Mitochondria is its own organism, has its own DNA that is separate and distinct from nuclear DNA. It has been very successful through very close cooperation.[0]
True, though largely limited to DNA necessary for its functions. I don’t have a citation on me (mobile) but there’s evidence that more “generic” mitochondrial DNA was integrated into the nuclear DNA, and that this is also the case for other endosymbionts.
I have a hypothesis for why this happens. Sexual reproduction has a very neat property: Recombination. Two individuals that each have one harmful mutation can through recombination have offspring without either of them. This allows removal of harmful mutations from the gene pool without terminating someones entire lineage - important when every generation comes with a decade of mutations, unlike microorganisms that are more on the scale of hours or days. However mitochondrial DNA cannot recombine, so it cannot benefit from this mechanism. Therefore it makes sense to move as much DNA as possible from the mitochondria to the nucleus. The same goes for the Y-chromosome, and could explain why it has been losing genes over time at a truly astounding pace.
> In the last 190 million years, the number of genes on the Y has plummeted from more than 1,000 to roughly 50, a loss of more than 95 percent.
I'd think it's quite likely. This also somewhat happens at animal scale FYI. See "colonial organisms" such as zooids / siphonophores, which consist of multiple separate animals that are able to join and work in together and take on specialized roles to form and behave as one larger animal.
None of the utility libraries helped with this, instead wrote a shell script to orchestrate concurrent puppeteer load tests with jest and collect and parse reports. It is very resource intensive and spiky. I'm looking to see how we can make it more efficient.
My bet is on hormonal changes due to modern living and/or it's impact on the gut microbiome. I'm mid thirties with low body fat and somewhat athletic and got diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer last year with no history in the family. My support groups regularly get new people around my age.
It's scary to think that in the next few years these cancers will no longer be an old person's illness because chemo is absolutely devastating.
I like that it makes you estimate half a second rather than a while integer.
One way I manage to consistently get a close score was to count numbers as quickly as I could and see how many I would need to count to get to 5.5s and got mighty close a few times.
Excited to see ML based approaches that can help us diagnose and triage CUPS (cancer of unknown primary source). Hope this is as revelatory as sequencing was. Traditional chemo is absolutely debilitating, so any chance for targeted therapies in earlier lines is life changing.
I hope in my lifetime, I will get to see a new cancer treatment that works well. I've watched too many people die such painful deaths. The chemo is bad. The radiation is bad. When it decides to start causing pain and shutting down limbs and body functions. Terrible. Reversing that would be amazing.
Agreed. Immunotherapy is a great start but it is only applicable for a very small section of cancer patients. I hope we can look back at our current treatments as barbaric once we unlock more specific treatments. Cancer also isn't a one size fits all, it might end up as a lot of similarly manifesting diseases that don't have a general holy grail fix.
I found their explanations of how each token works - hijacking an egress pathway - quite fascinating. I wonder if this will ever catch on so well as to see countermeasures.
I recently heard about this in my stage 4 support group. No doctor will go on record that they do it however. God forbid there be dignity in choosing when to shuffle off the mortal coil.
Being a doctor must be tough. My brother is a doctor, though we aren't close or even on speaking terms. But I hear his tales via our mom.
A recent tale is that a family member got a bad cancer. Our mom called him to get the scoop, who he'll only give to her, apparently. He said 'Mom, she'll be dead in two years. She'll initially respond really well to treatment, then just get worse until the end.'
Doctors know these things, but many won't tell the patient because it's depressing, and also there's a tiny chance they're wrong.
Of course neither told said family member, and she's currently in the responding well phase. It's shattering hearing their hope, so I guess their doctor wasn't blunt either...
My mother spent thirty years in the OR saving cancer patients, so I know a thing or two about this topic. Different patients respond differently to treatment, life expectancy can vary greatly even in the terminal stage, so doctors are unlikely to know “she'll be dead in two years. She'll initially respond really well to treatment, then just get worse until the end.” Delivering that information when there actual is non-negligible hope left would be imprudent.
I think the pendulum might be swinging the other way - me and a lot of other folks in my stage 4 support group got given a very grim diagnosis and subsequent prognoses from our oncologists even though the 5 year survival statistics are outdated.
It was quite depressing in the beginning but after connecting with some people who have survived years past their onc's expiry date, I feel hopeful.
Apologies if my previous comment was doom and gloom - was just thinking about the things doctors do and perhaps even know and have to decide... sounds incredibly stressful. But of course that was one specific case, and every case and person is different.
Anyhow, stay strong, and best of luck to you, truly.
Rereading what I'd written sounded awkward, I guess I was trying to explain it was third hand information without being evasive/mysterious.
Didn't mean it as a complaint or even bad thing. Last time we saw each other he kept making incredibly racist comments about and even to my (nonwhite) wife and kid's face - it was the first time they'd even met!
> Last time we saw each other he kept making incredibly racist comments about and even to my (nonwhite) wife and kid's face - it was the first time they'd even met!
Well, that's certainly unfortunate. I honestly do not know how you can bridge a gap that wide.
Yes — my grandfather, who had a chest infection aged 99¾, was given an increasing amount of morphine for the pain (instead of antibiotics). The death came at the point he could no longer recognise his children, where his quality of life was basically nil. It was a release.
There is nothing illegal about causing death in the pursuit of treatment or reducing pain and suffering. It's obviously a fine line, but giving a patient who is in severe pain so much morphine it hastens their death is not illegal.
