This entry is mirrored from the author’s blog.
Since I’m a human in 2014, I’ve had my life impacted in some way by cancer. As have all of you. Wednesday evening at Brooklyn’s
Genspace, Dr. Simona Giunta gave a talk on some of the basics of cancer entitled — “Cells, DNA and the Truth about Cancer.”
Dr. Giunta is a cancer research at Rockefeller University and team member of
know-science.org,
a non-profit group that works on promoting science education and
knowledge. Since the purpose of the talk was to help bring better
awareness of the science behind cancer to the non-scientific community
(of which I am a member of), I thought I’d put down the big takeaways I
had from the talk. Working backwards from the end. In a very
non-scientific format.
The big delivery
The
real cure will take individualized medicine, but going all in on
individualized medicine is not something Dr. Giunta advocates — it’s
expensive and will segregate by economic status (Though, I wonder if
there’s a Moore’s law for biology).
The
real-world solution, the right-now solution is: Play the statistical
odds. Don’t smoke, eat healthy (that can be picked apart in a lot of
ways), exercise, wear sunscreen, and don’t drink too much. Sound advice,
not bad advice, but somewhat unexpected advice coming from a cancer
researcher.
Why individualized medicine? Why is this expensive, far away route the only true cure?
Cancer
cells are cells that don’t die. Normal, altruistic cells kill
themselves off after extensive damage (think peeling skin from a
sunburn). Cancer cells are cells that literally have the ability to kill
themselves blocked. It is kind of like Bill Murray in Groundhog’s Day.
We’ve done the genome project, why can’t we just fix that part of a person’s DNA?
Two reasons.
- The
genome project was done on a somatic cell. While genetically speaking,
all of our cells are similar (minus some mutations here and there). The
part of the genetic code that gets read by different cells, is well,
different. Liver cells, bone cells, skin cells are all reading from the
same book, but they are reading different pages. So the story is
slightly different for each of them.
- Changing
the DNA of every single of the trillions of cells in our body is not
possible. The majority of cancers are due to random mutation that could
happen in any cell in our body. To find that single cells before it
becomes a tumor, before it acquires more mutations and divide to give
rise to many cancer cells, would be like finding a needle in an
haystack, or worst: a cancer cell in hundred trillion cells in our body.
Yet, usually our immune system does precisely that. Sometimes, though,
one could escape it’s attention…
Alright, so, cancer is a DNA/gene issue. So why does lifestyle matter?
Mutations
happen. You can inherit some, yes. Others happen because of external
factors in your life — smoking, bad diet, radiation exposure.
Some
happen because, well, we’re imperfect and so are the biological systems
we have that are responsible for copying our genetic code. Sometimes,
there are bad copies. It doesn’t matter if you stay inside all day
eating kale smoothies on a treadmill, you will have mutations.
It’s
not even limited to copies. It’s just general repairs. DNA inside a
cell can get damaged for all sorts of external reasons. They’re
resilient and efficient as hell, but they might still make an error in
their repairs.
Mutations that block
the self-destructing code of cells (which means a cell can’t kill
itself, which means cancer) can happen during any of the
thousands-millions of DNA copies or repairs that occur each day in each
of the 100 trillion cells we have in our body.
That’s a lot of activity to monitor.
So yeah, there’s a lot of things that we just really can’t control yet.
Ergo
you have to know the person, their cells, and the mutations that unique
individual has in their genetic code. That level of uniqueness
described above is staggering. That’s why using scientifically acquired
statistics to prescribe lifestyle choices is the best option we have
right now. Control what you can control. Take the rest in stride.
