ELEPHANTS AND CANCER

Church somewhere along the Thames

Left to right: Derek, irascible captain of our river boat; our two fellow passengers (names long since forgotten); Linda

 

Wow!  Daughter Kristen has alerted me to a fascinating article about elephants and cancer.  It seems that elephants rarely get cancer, at least when compared with humans, even though they have far more cells in which mutations can accumulate.  My simple-minded understanding is that mutations can occur spontaneously and randomly, even in the absence of what sophisticated people seem to want to call “mutagens”.  (Yes, I know that elephants don’t smoke, but they don’t use sun block, either.)  If the “right” kinds of mutations accumulate, cancer will develop.  Thus it should follow that elephants, having vastly more cells than even the largest humans (even the defensive line of the Green Bay Packers), they should get more cancer.  But they don’t.

Well, it turns out that evolution or some higher power has provided them with protection.  There is a gene, p53 by name, which codes for a protein which acts as a tumor suppressor; that is, it functions as a brake on uncontrolled cellular division.  As you know, uncontrolled cellular division is one way to describe cancer.  We humans have two copies of the p53 gene; elephants have very many more.  Thus, if one or two of our genes gets screwed up we are potentially in hot water, whereas the elephant has many to spare.  Great, simple story.  I hope I understand it.

So, doesn’t that suggest a way to grapple effectively with a whole range of cancers?  We can splice stuff into genomes; half the food we eat has been modified in that way (I know you didn’t want to hear that.  Get over it.)  So why can’t we simply splice extra copies of the p53 gene into the germline of everybody?   Of course, that would take more money than exists in the visible universe, but it is a thought.  I may have the biology totally screwed up here, too, and if I do I hope somebody will set me straight.

The Seahawks lost today - but they were wearing pink.  Maybe breast cancer lost, too.



HOW DNA SURVIVES

Linda at San Simeon

The latest Nobel Prize for chemistry has gone to three guys who  made fundamental contributions to the biology of DNA – specifically, how it manages to survive in the real world.  As diligent readers of this blog you already know that a considerable amount of energy is being and has been expended in figuring out how to inhibit DNA repair (and thus hasten death) in cancer cells.  Well, these three lucky, diligent and super-smart gentlemen have helped lay the foundation for this research.  Here I a short, readable NY Times article on the subject.  Read it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/08/science/tomas-lindahl-paul-modrich-aziz-sancarn-nobel-chemistry.html?ref=health&_r=0

 God bless these guys, and I hope they enjoy their $320,000.

 

 



DO NOT READ THIS BOOK...unless

Granddaughter Angie contends with the horse from hell

Do not read this book unless you are an obsessed biochemical hotdog, a masochist, or an insomniac. 

The book is Life’ Greatest Secret by Dr. Matthew Cobb, described as a professor of zoology and history of science at the University of Manchester.  I, of course, am indisputably obsessed with this stuff; I read everything that comes along.  I read Dr. Cobb’s book faithfully, from cover to cover, and benefitted thereby.  However, if I had not been so obsessed it would have been painful to plod through at least the opening 2/3 of the book (I will explain why), and I could have managed to do so only if I had a deep-seated self-loathing.

But one thing is certain: for anyone, the first sections of Dr. Cobb’s book  provide an unfailing, fast-acting remedy for insomnia.

I should add that the assessment above does not apply to what must have been Dr. Cobb’s target audience; the several dozen molecular geneticists in the world who also happen to be interested in the history and philosophy of science.  I wonder why he didn’t simply write them a letter.

Okay, so now let’s stop flinging mud at the poor guy and get down to business.

The book is 314 pages long.  The first 218 constitute a methodically detailed chronology of developments in genetics until the end of the 1960s.  At times it seems to be little more than a record of papers presented at various conferences, with some discussion of their significance.  Additionally, there lurks everywhere throughout this section the sense that it is necessary to refute the notion that cybernetics and information theory are vital to understanding what was going on.  Cobb thinks not, and I agree – but, anyway, who in heck cares how many bits of information may or may not be contained in a stretch of DNA?  All we should care about is what the damned stuff codes for, and what that means for human beings.  In this section we learn such vital stuff as how to pronounce the names Gamow and Rosalind.  Well, I didn’t know, so thanks, Matt.

This same material is covered more accessibly by Horace Judson’s book The Eighth Day of Creation.

Then suddenly, on p. 219, the machine drops into 4-wheel drive and new, interesting material appears.  Gene splicing, epigenetics, retroviruses, transposons, the nature of “junk” DNA, CRISPR, lots of topical stuff, much of it explained very well.  Is this the same guy, I ask.  This part – most of it, anyway – is not the least soporific; in fact, it kept me awake past my bedtime.  I should remark that you probably won’t get much out of this section unless you are at least at my level of biochemical sophistication, which Lord knows is saying very little.  But if you don’t know what mRNA, tRNA or codons (similar creatures) are you will have a hard time.

So, sorry to be so hard on you, Matt.  You should have written 314 pages on the last third of the book.

I want to close with a quotation, from p. 312.  It seems to me to capsulize much of what is wrong with the current phase of our War on Cancer:

“The increasingly tight budgets of funding organizations encourage large teams by promoting multidisciplinarity and often require the probable outcomes to be clear before the experiments have begun.  It seems unlikely that the small, curiosity-driven teams that led to the cracking of the genetic code would survive in today’s climate.”



WHY I WRITE THESE THINGS

Springtime in Borrego

Probably 2009

From time to time I get a little bummed out about this blog.  I love doing it, that’s the bottom line.  However, I am sometimes skeptical of its value.  Is anybody really reading these carefully crafted  meticulously researched little gems?  (Well, it usually takes me at least an hour to put one together, including the time needed to dig up the facts.)  I’m not sure.  If I leave an entry on Blogger without inflicting it on Facebook I can expect to get 20-40 hits – in six months or so.  Many of these are from places like Ukraine or Moldova, and are vanishingly unlikely to represent real human beings.  If I put it on Facebook I can look forward to 20-40 hits in a month or so – most on the first day.  Also, I get up to perhaps ten “likes”; usually far fewer.  Hell, I could get ten “likes” by posting a picture of a dead spider!  The evidence, as they say about global warming, is inescapable: “Myrl’sBlog” is not a big hit, in the usual sense of the term.  So why do I keep on blogging?  Here’s why.  (It just came to me this morning.)

When Linda was diagnosed with epithelial ovarian cancer, I literally had almost no idea of what that meant.  Rolled back on my heels, I perforce accepted the oncologist’s assessment without means of eliciting important information.  Of course, I knew that ovarian cancer was cancer of the ovaries.  Here is a partial list of things I didn’t know, but should have learned.

What stage was she in?

What is the prognosis?

What does the epithelial part mean?

Are there clinical trials she could benefit from?

Are there novel treatment protocols permeating the practice?

Who is the best damned OVCA oncologist in the known universe?

And so forth.  It wouldn’t have been necessary, or even very useful, to spout stuff about PARP inhibitors, targeted therapies, immune system manipulation, etc., etc. – heck, the oncologist I was talking to probably had no time to follow up such esoteric stuff.  But he could have answered several of those questions, and told me where to look for answers to the rest.  I simply didn’t know what to ask.

So here is why I think this blog remains useful.  I AM TELLING YOU WHAT TO ASK!  You can search my list of (over 360) blogs for things like “clinical trials”, or “targeted therapies”, or “types of ovarian cancer”, and you will find basic information and clues as to where to learn more.  Then if, God forbid, you need to ask the questions I couldn't' ask – you will know what to say.  A particularly important blog in this regard is the following:

http://ljb-quiltcutie.blogspot.com/2014/07/clinical-trials-and-how-to-find-them.html

I wish to hell there had been a Myrl’sBlog in 2007, and I had been reading it.  And that is why I will keep on writing this thing.



MORE ON HORMONE REPLACEMENT THERAPY

Linda's quilted parrot

Just an artistic doodle while she planned her next blockbuster

 

Those of you who actually READ these things certainly are aware that hormone replacement therapy is a contributing factor to ovarian cancer and  should be avoided if possible.  Now, however, there appears  a new study that seems to indicate that HRT is okay, and possibly even slightly beneficial, if you already HAVE epithelial ovarian cancer (the most common kind).  HRT in such instances is not a cure, but it may buy a significant amount of precious time.  Apparently it is early days in this research topic, but results to date are encouraging.  The article itself is a downer.  Here it is:

http://www.webmd.com/ovarian-cancer/news/20150929/hrt-ovarian-cancer-women

 



BISCUIT AND GRAVY, BACON, AND THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Linda clearly wants to play on the grass

Christ Church, Oxford University

 

I cannot eat breakfast without something to read.  Well, or someone to talk to, but that is rare these days.  Usually I read the Economist, but owing to the expanding muddle inhabiting my skull  I forgot to renew my subscription.  That lead me to spend $3.00 on a Wall Street Journal  this morning – God help my finances if my new  Economist subscription takes very long to arrive.  (For you liberals muttering that I should have purchased the New York Times instead; it was $4.50.  Remember when you could get a good newspaper for a quarter?  No, of course you don’t.)  But anyway, I found an interesting article in today’s Journal which I wanted to share with you, but the cheapskates won’t let me access it on line unless I subscribe, which I will not do.  The article is framed as an attack on Hillary, but it has some good stuff on the FDA and generic drugs which I will summarize below.

As all of you know, if a drug company dreams up a new drug it must get permission from the Federal Drug Administration to place the drug on the market.  This costs many millions of dollars and sometimes takes a half-dozen years or so.  However, if the drug is approved the company then has exclusive right to manufacture and market it for a set period of time.  When that time is up the drug becomes “generic”, and its price usually falls dramatically.  I thought that becoming generic was automatic, quick and cheap, but I was wrong.  If your wonder drug for growing hair recently has gone off patent and I want to manufacture an identical generic, I must submit something called an Abbreviated New Drug Application to the FDA.  This can cost me between $1 and $5 million!  There are said to be thousands of such drugs waiting approval; on average, four submissions and resubmission are required.  Also, there has been a recent “crackdown “on generic  drug manufactures, which the author of the piece – a medical doctor but also obviously a conservative – views with some skepticism.  The bulk of the piece nit-picks some of Hillary’s pronouncements on drug pricing, but that part can be ignored with no significant loss of value.  Who cares what Hillary thinks, anyway – Biden/Warren looms.

The moral of this story seems to be:  Some regulation is useful, even necessary, but it is easy to get carried away.



MORE ON ASPIRIN

Sisters, 2008

Back to our old friends, the USPSTF*.  I haven’t always been exactly fair to them, usually treating their suggestions with skepticism or downright annoyance.  However, this time I think they have hit the nail squarely, and countersunk it.  They recommend daily small-dose aspirin for adults over 50.  The article I am quoting appears in The Week, a good magazine.  However, cheap buggers that they are, they won’t let you read the article unless you have a subscription.  Hence:  Here it is:

*United States Preventative Services Task Force

 

An influential task force of medical experts has sparked controversy by recommending that adults over 50 take a daily low-dose aspirin to prevent both heart attacks and colorectal cancer. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, appointed by the federal Department of Health and Human Services, said its extensive review of data found that adults who are at increased risk of cardiovascular disease could benefit from daily aspirin use, even if they have not had previous heart problems. One study found a 22 percent reduction in heart attacks. A daily low-dose aspirin taken over 10 years also lowers the risk of colon cancer by up to 40 percent, the panel said. Many doctors, however, oppose daily aspirin for people with no prior history of heart disease, on the grounds that the drug’s anti-clotting effect can cause bleeding in the stomach, intestines, and brain and possibly lead to strokes. But the task force, whose recommendation will have strong influence in the medical community, said the benefits of low-dose aspirin outweigh the risks, especially for people in their 50s with signs of heart disease or a history of heart attacks. Dr. Douglas Owens, a Stanford University professor and task force member, told CBSNews.com that the recommendation does not mean that people should take aspirin without consulting their doctor. “If you’re a person trying to decide whether to take aspirin, you’d want to be aware of all the potential benefits and the potential harms,” Owens said.

The Week