the apparently deep connections between cancer and stem cells.

[papau]

http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2004/12/26/genetically_engineered_zebrafish_offer_promise/

Genetically engineered zebrafish offer promise
By Gareth Cook, Globe Staff | December 26, 2004

The discovery of cancer stem cells is just one result of the increasing scientific attention being paid to a once-unheralded corner of biology: the apparently deep connections between cancer and stem cells.

Biologists have long been intrigued by these connections. Now, fueled by rapid progress in both stem cells and cancer research, they hope to mine them for use in a broad array of fields, including drug invention and human development.

Among these researchers is Len Zon, a developmental biologist who runs a new stem cell initiative at Children's Hospital. His lab's research illustrates the possible reach of such science -- and also the long distance that can lie between promising science and useful therapies.

On a recent visit to his lab, Zon stopped next to a tiny aquarium and pointed to the school of zebrafish swimming lazily inside. Zon is partial to these silvery, black-striped little fish as research subjects because in many ways their biology is strikingly similar to that of humans, and they are easier to breed and work with than mice.

By genetically engineering zebrafish, he is slowly teasing out new facts about one apparent biological similarity between stem cells and cancer. The similarity involves a pathway -- a kind of signaling system from cell to cell -- called "Notch," first named for the telltale notches on the wings of fruit flies with disruptions in the pathway.<snip>

[Lautremont]

1. All of this "science" is simply another Libero-Satanic plot!

Or should that be a Satano-Liberal plot?

[tridim]

4. Only liberals would want to cure cancer

and put the drug companies out of business. Every good repuke knows that.

[flyingfysh]

2. there is an even weirder cancer connection

Everyone has heard of slime molds. At one stage in their life, they make a singly body, with parts. At another stage, they break up into individual cells and scatter in all directions (I hope I'm not mangling the facts too badly). It turns out there is a gene that controls this behavior.

For humans in at least some kinds of cancers, tumors can metasticize and start cancer in lots of other places in the body.

It turns out that the gene that controls this behavior of cancer tumors is the same as the gene that controls slime mold spread.

This would suggest that cancer, humans, and slime molds share a very long and tangled evolutionary history. I'm sure experts can add much more to this.

[papau]

3. Interesting - slime mold human interchanges?

thanks for the very interesting post!

[FreeCajun]

5. There are books about this...

I've seen them in my local organic foods shop.
Slime molds are some of my favorite things, incidentally, and that is roughly how they live. Lichens as well. They also break apart into little bundles of mixed cells, much like metastatis.

Here are some excerpts from related websites, and a few links.

"For example, in 1999 Meinolf Karthaus, MD, watched three different children with leukemia suddenly go into remission upon receiving a triple antifungal drug cocktail for their "secondary" fungal infections.(1)

Pre-dating that, Mark Bielski stated back in 1997 that leukemia, whether acute or chronic, is intimately associated with the yeast, Candida albicans. (2)

Finally, almost 50 years ago, Dr. J. Walter Wilson, in his textbook of clinical mycology, said that "it has been established that histoplasmosis and such reticuloendothelioses as leukemia, Hodgkin's disease, lymphosarcoma, and sarcoidosis are found to be coexistent much more frequently than is statistically justifiable on the basis of coincidence." (3)"


The late Milton White, MD., did exactly this. He fully believed that cancer is a "chronic, intracellular, infectious, biologically induced spore (fungus) transformation disease." (4) Using the proper isolation techniques (involving saline instead of formaldehyde as a tissue transportation medium between the operating room and the pathology lab), he was able to find fungal spores in every sample of cancer tissue he studied. His lifetime work has been routinely dismissed as nothing more than an unproven postulate."

from http://www.mercola.com/2003/may/24/cancer_contagious.htm

Also see:

http://www.doctorfungus.org/

http://www.rense.com/general44/russell.htm