I’m unclear on why cancer research doesn’t seem to be taking a more first principles approach like the following.
The distant ancestors of our cells were single cell organisms. The default behavior of single cell organisms is to replicate basically whenever possible. Therefore our cells likely have a replication inhibition mechanism. Cancer is what happens when a cell’s replication inhibition mechanism breaks (or rather, when the code to produce the mechanism becomes corrupted).
It feels like we should be pouring money into identifying the replication inhibition mechanism in our genome and figuring out ways to reinforce it. To start we could find the mechanism in the simplest multi cell organisms, since they must have a similar mechanism and it may in fact turn out to be very similar to our own (i.e. we could get lucky).
Is this sort of research happening? It doesn’t sound easy, of course, but I haven’t heard of anything like it underway.
The distant ancestors of our cells were single cell organisms. The default behavior of single cell organisms is to replicate basically whenever possible. Therefore our cells likely have a replication inhibition mechanism. Cancer is what happens when a cell’s replication inhibition mechanism breaks (or rather, when the code to produce the mechanism becomes corrupted).
It feels like we should be pouring money into identifying the replication inhibition mechanism in our genome and figuring out ways to reinforce it. To start we could find the mechanism in the simplest multi cell organisms, since they must have a similar mechanism and it may in fact turn out to be very similar to our own (i.e. we could get lucky).
Is this sort of research happening? It doesn’t sound easy, of course, but I haven’t heard of anything like it underway.