For me cancer is an exciting fascinating, but simultaneously fear-inducing phenomenon, similar to playing with fire, because it is nature’s proof that immortality is not only possible, but wide-spread evolved biological reality. This gives us plenty of opportunities to observe options for delaying and eventually stopping all adverse effects of aging while simultaneously claiming the lives of far too many patients every single day. If we want to cure cancer, we must reverse aging into physiological, metabolic cellular rejuvenation, because otherwise, if no action is taken, the aging immune system can eventually no longer maintain its comprehensive anti-cancer surveillance.
However, the cancerous tissue is only one of the at least two major variables affecting treatment outcome, because the specific physiological and metabolic constitution of the still non-cancerous somatic cells is at least equally important. If we cannot yet maximize the benefits of anti-aging and rejuvenating interventions extending lifespan and health-span due to their unfortunately still way too little acceptance by the general public, healthcare providers and even research professionals, we must live with the inevitable consequence that with advancing age cancer cannot be cured permanently yet, because it keeps evolving until initially very effective interventions gradually fail. The thus induced evolutionary race between cancer, medical interventions, physiological and immunological conditions, which deviate widely even among patients suffering from genetically identical tumors, will challenge medical providers to discover unique very patient-specific interventions faster than the cancer can kill. E.g. younger and otherwise still healthy patients can tolerate much higher dosage of toxic anti-cancer drugs than fragile older patients who therefore need completely different medical interventions.
Hence, as long as rejuvenation and immortality are not yet actively pursued, we will have lots of cancer patients, who relapse every few years and who therefore, require their own cancer chaser or cancer suppressing scientist, who must develop novel and effective live-saving anti-cancer treatments for each of his/her patients faster than the relapsing cancer can kill, e.g. by taking advantage of the unique differences between tumors and cancer-free tissues. Cancers can only develop by differing from the remaining cells giving them a replicative advantage. Fortunately, this makes cancers more vulnerable to any intervention, which harms the more rapidly dividing tumor faster than cancer-free cells.
In the near future better collaborations between patients and their healthcare providers allows patients to actively choose any combination of interventions offered by their physicians. This makes current FDA approval procedures obsolete, because realistically, the lives of our patients depend much more on timely discovering and exploiting novel distinctive fitness differences between tumor and healthy tissues in the presence of external stressors than on unlikely adverse drug reactions. Most unexpected adverse effects of such kind of rapidly evolving experimental cancer and patient-specific treatment won’t kill immediately and can be stopped on time. Currently, no drug, which harms 10%, but saves the lives of 90%, can get approved despite helping 9 times more people. Soon lots of these rare adverse drug reactions can be much more reliably predicted based on genotypic data.
The pivotal role of our research at Fred Hutchinson is to discover, explore and evaluate the effects of novel interventions, because medical providers can add them to their expanding and cancer-discriminating toolboxes, out of which they can let their patients choose their preferred interventions based on their side-effects and other personal preferences. We at Fred Hutchinson want to give our healthcare providers a head start by supplying them with as many cancer-discriminating techniques far enough in advance to have enough time for discovering the best way to force an aggressively metastasizing tumor back into remission before it kills.
From an economic commercial perspective, this rapid co-evolution between interventions and relapsing metastasizing or rapidly growing tumors is generating life-saving medical demands from which even the privately funded sector can commercially benefit until the effective reversal of aging has become a feasible alternative to chasing cancers for the rest of the patients’ lives.
At Fred Hutchinson we can provide proof-of-principle that above outlined adaptations to develop ever changing cancer-suppressing combinations will allow adding many more years to the lives of cancer victims compared to current health policy practices. We will soon need realistic and goal-oriented - instead of procedure-oriented - healthcare and research policies to save the lives of many more people for much longer. This would cause a new powerful, innovative and self-directed group of professional cancer suppressors to thrive while gradually transitioning to fully cancer-curing anti-aging interventions, which are caused by eliminating the age-dependent and exponentially rising risk for developing cancer, because of the gradual overall metabolic, physiological and cognitive decline due to aging. Aging is the true master disease of all age-related degenerative diseases because it raises susceptibility to its many symptoms, e.g. Alzheimer, Parkinson, Cancer, Diabetes, Macular Degeneration, Depression, Infections, Pneumonia, Dementia, Hearing Loss, Cardiovascular Diseases, Strokes, etc.
I am fascinated by the prospective of true ageless immortality. That is why I used machine learning techniques to predict, model and reverse-engineer aging in yeast. Like yeast, cancer cells are constantly dividing. I expect an even better gene-function-specific time series clustering outcome for cancer because of much more abundant cancer training data. My most extensive time series yeast RNA microarray dataset had only 81 time points, taken in 4 minute intervals spanning only 3 complete cell cycles during 6 hours. Since there is more interest in cancer than in yeast research, I hope to get to analyze high temporal resolution cancer datasets with at least 12 transcriptome, proteome, metabolome, and epigenetic at least 12 time points per cell cycle over many cell cycles to test my aging hypothesis not only on yeast but also on human cells.
Dear Dr. Thomas Hahn, I totally agree with Dr. Abdallah Hussien Fathy and Cancer is not fascinating at all.
Cancer, which killed about 530 million people in the 20th Century alone according to the info-graphic 20th Century Death — Information is Beautiful, is one of the cruelest killers, as I among many know from personal experience. My father’s last hope, as he was dying from leukemia in 1999, was that his kidneys would cease to function and cause a quick death, so that he would be spared the agony of slow suffocation. Malaysian photographer Achmed Yusni documented the cancer death of his brother in pictures in order to show just how cruel the disease is.
However, there is no evidence that cancer ever caused a demographic catastrophe like the Black Death in 14th Century Europe or like the smallpox epidemics in the Americas in the 15th and 16th centuries. Being a non-communicable disease (at least among humans), it was also unlikely that it ever would.
It is also a much slower killer than the 1918 flu pandemic.
As a cause of human death throughout history, cancer and non-communicable diseases in general rank far behind infectious diseases, including each of smallpox and tuberculosis. The latter disease probably killed more human beings throughout history than any other disease. In the early 19th Century annual mortality rates from TB in Europe were between 800 and 1,000 per 100,000 per year (John Frith, "History of Tuberculosis. Part 1 - Phthisis, consumption and the White Plague", Journal of Military and Veterans’ Health, Volume 22 No. 2). Applied to the current world population approaching 7,484 million (according to Worldometers - real time world statistics), the lower of the rates mentioned by Frith (0.8 % per year) would mean about 59,872,000 annual deaths from tuberculosis alone, which is about the current total number of annual worldwide deaths from all causes (the number of worldwide deaths in 2014, which I estimated on the basis of a Worldometers screenshot on December 31, 2014 at 23:29:54 hours GMT, was 57,359,385 out of 7,203,286,272 world inhabitants). For comparison, cancer killed about 8.2 million people throughout the world in 2012, according to Worldwide cancer statistics.
Dying from tuberculosis could be as horrible as dying from cancer:
Where other epidemics might last weeks or months, where even the bubonic plague would be marked forever afterwards by the year it reigned, the epidemics of tuberculosis would last whole centuries and even multiples of centuries. Tuberculosis rose slowly, silently, seeping into the homes of millions, like an ageless miasma. And once arrived, it never went away again. Year after year, century after century, it tightened its relentless hold, worsening whenever war or famine reduced the peoples’ resistance, infecting virtually everybody, inexplicably sparing some while destroying others, bringing the young down unto their sickbeds, where the flesh slowly fell from their bones and they were consumed in the years-long fever, their minds brilliantly alert until, in apocalyptic numbers, they died, like the fallen leaves of a dreadful and premature autumn. […] It would be all too easy to forget that for the vast majority of victims, poor and without artistry, the reality of tuberculosis was a distant cry from the pampered invalid of Edwardian paintings: it was the young boy or girl unable to take part in sports at school, too breathless to enjoy life, or the wasted adult driven to poverty by the inability to work, the intermittent years-long separations from family and friends while incarcerated in sanitoria, the final months of consuming fever, the skeletal weight loss, the coughing of bright red arterial blood into the lonely night-time pillow. Perhaps the most haunting image of all is that of the baby, hidden behind screens in the remotest corner of the hospital ward, where the fatal agony of tuberculosis meningitis could be hidden from sight.
(Frank Ryan, The Forgotten Plague: How the Battle Against Tuberculosis Was Won - And Lost, pp. 21–22 and 25.).
Dear Dr. Thomas Hahn, I totally agree with Dr. Abdallah Hussien Fathy and Cancer is not fascinating at all.
Cancer, which killed about 530 million people in the 20th Century alone according to the info-graphic 20th Century Death — Information is Beautiful, is one of the cruelest killers, as I among many know from personal experience. My father’s last hope, as he was dying from leukemia in 1999, was that his kidneys would cease to function and cause a quick death, so that he would be spared the agony of slow suffocation. Malaysian photographer Achmed Yusni documented the cancer death of his brother in pictures in order to show just how cruel the disease is.
However, there is no evidence that cancer ever caused a demographic catastrophe like the Black Death in 14th Century Europe or like the smallpox epidemics in the Americas in the 15th and 16th centuries. Being a non-communicable disease (at least among humans), it was also unlikely that it ever would.
It is also a much slower killer than the 1918 flu pandemic.
As a cause of human death throughout history, cancer and non-communicable diseases in general rank far behind infectious diseases, including each of smallpox and tuberculosis. The latter disease probably killed more human beings throughout history than any other disease. In the early 19th Century annual mortality rates from TB in Europe were between 800 and 1,000 per 100,000 per year (John Frith, "History of Tuberculosis. Part 1 - Phthisis, consumption and the White Plague", Journal of Military and Veterans’ Health, Volume 22 No. 2). Applied to the current world population approaching 7,484 million (according to Worldometers - real time world statistics), the lower of the rates mentioned by Frith (0.8 % per year) would mean about 59,872,000 annual deaths from tuberculosis alone, which is about the current total number of annual worldwide deaths from all causes (the number of worldwide deaths in 2014, which I estimated on the basis of a Worldometers screenshot on December 31, 2014 at 23:29:54 hours GMT, was 57,359,385 out of 7,203,286,272 world inhabitants). For comparison, cancer killed about 8.2 million people throughout the world in 2012, according to Worldwide cancer statistics.
Dying from tuberculosis could be as horrible as dying from cancer:
Where other epidemics might last weeks or months, where even the bubonic plague would be marked forever afterwards by the year it reigned, the epidemics of tuberculosis would last whole centuries and even multiples of centuries. Tuberculosis rose slowly, silently, seeping into the homes of millions, like an ageless miasma. And once arrived, it never went away again. Year after year, century after century, it tightened its relentless hold, worsening whenever war or famine reduced the peoples’ resistance, infecting virtually everybody, inexplicably sparing some while destroying others, bringing the young down unto their sickbeds, where the flesh slowly fell from their bones and they were consumed in the years-long fever, their minds brilliantly alert until, in apocalyptic numbers, they died, like the fallen leaves of a dreadful and premature autumn. […] It would be all too easy to forget that for the vast majority of victims, poor and without artistry, the reality of tuberculosis was a distant cry from the pampered invalid of Edwardian paintings: it was the young boy or girl unable to take part in sports at school, too breathless to enjoy life, or the wasted adult driven to poverty by the inability to work, the intermittent years-long separations from family and friends while incarcerated in sanitoria, the final months of consuming fever, the skeletal weight loss, the coughing of bright red arterial blood into the lonely night-time pillow. Perhaps the most haunting image of all is that of the baby, hidden behind screens in the remotest corner of the hospital ward, where the fatal agony of tuberculosis meningitis could be hidden from sight.
(Frank Ryan, The Forgotten Plague: How the Battle Against Tuberculosis Was Won - And Lost, pp. 21–22 and 25.).
Dear Dr. Hahn,
Explanation of your question is too long.
I have visited some cancer patients (lung, mouth, breast) and the painful condition of the patients with metastasis at different organs is even intolerable to look at.
I never wish that disease even for the most notorious criminal of the world.
a- Cancer is not deadly, as a matter of fact, over 50% of cancer cases are cured by surgery, with or without some added therapy.
b- The only disease with a 100% mortality rate is birth
We won't win without the Divine Help the battle against death, but we could win many battles to disease.
The aphorism was: 'Cure sometimes, relieve always'.
'Divinum est sedare dolorem'
Gesund +
To Shibabrata: your comment is very good, as many forget that relatives, non-professionals watching a diseased person with masks, indwelling catheters, a terminal condition, do make an empathy image, a ToM, about the sufferings of case well above the actual feelings of the involved person, this exerting pressure to eliminate some therapies or even voluntary killing, misnomer: 'Euthanasia'
Gesund +
Cancer is a group of disease that cause morbidity and mortality. It is not the first killer in the World. It can be prevented, cured and ameliorated. The problem is in the social hallow created around these diseases by doctors and people in the same time. It is unique however, in the sense that it is frightening to every one. One of the reasons for that, it is in many instances discovered late. It is one of the few disease that travel across the body without being felt. We have a responsibility to make cancer understandable, make people accept that it is preventable and that early detection facilitates cure and make survival possible and may be long after getting the disease.
The fascination in cancer therapy may be having the opportunity of fighting death, or even just confronting a complex intellectual challenge.
Just two quotations about this, one from Jesus:
'Who, whatever their efforts, could add a single hour to their lives?'
The other is an Arab tale: 'A man is walking on the streets of Alepo, and meets there his death, who shows an astonishment face upon encounter. Frightened, the man rides the whole night, arriving to Damascus, where he meets his death again; she tells him: 'I was astonished when I found you yesterday in Aleppo, as I knew I had to take you with me today in Damascus'.
The issue in death is not when, but rather 'how'; for relieving, the resources available are almost endless, just the therapy that is ignored is never applied, to the disease that is not diagnosed.
In developing places, issue is finding the resources for healthcare, in more advanced situations, that are day after day more and more common, the question is making the right, optimal use of all remedies available.
Thanks. Gesund +
Primary care and prevention is what interests me. Focus on lifestyle and looking after our bodies in early life.
I have read some of the responses, and wonder if perhaps "fascinating" may be the wrong word to use, and that is why some readers are objecting to this post. I have worked in the oncology field for over 30 years, and find I am always looking for new information, new studies, new ideas in an effort to stay on top of this. I am a life-long learner and appreciate the work being done in an effort to treat cancerous diseases.
Would I call cancer fascinating? Or intriguing? Challenging? Would some of you criticize my efforts to understand the mechanisms of cancer? Developing new therapies requires a need to learn and understand what you are fighting. I do not feel that immortality is going to be achieved by curing cancers. There are many other conditions of our human existence that will end our lives if cancer doesn't, and quite honestly, I have no desire to be immortal.
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