Claire

What I say here is all speculation.

I have always thought that cancer was maybe a way of making life more than life, or to put simply, an overshot of cell growth – too much life and hence too much cell division and overgrowth in a specific area, that overtakes. So it could be that the immune system in this instance, has evolved not able to destroy just the right amount of cell growth and the balance is out. From this perpective, maybe as a polar opposite, an over reactive immune system (MS, Asthma, Lupus) would indicate something just as bad, but rids cancer – the trade off from the body over evolution. It could be that pollutants and viruses (evloving with us – or we evolve with them?) are responable for re-programming our immune responnse back to it’s beahaviour towards cancer itself etc. Makes you wonder. If there are any studies into whether people with MS, Asthma, Lupus are immune to a certain type of cancer, that could give us clues.

Claire

Just saw the movie on TV. Really good.

A little blogging told me that Shiva is not female and not the Goddess of Death. Death of Proteins, perhaps.

[Carl: For some reason, Shiva came to mind via Robert Oppenheimer.]

“This is the story of how biology of the 20th century neglected
and otherwise mishandled the study of what is arguably the
most important problem in all of science: the nature of the
evolutionary process. This problem has suffered the indignity
of being dismissed as unimportant to a basic understanding of
biology by molecular biology; it went effectively unrecognized
by a microbiology still in the throes of trying to find itself; and
it became the private domain of a quasi-scientific movement,
who secreted it away in a morass of petty scholasticism, effectively
disguising the fact that their primary concern with it was
ideological, not scientific. Despite this discouraging beginning,
our story will end well: the study of the microbial world at the
beginning of the 21st century is liberating biology from the
Procrustean bed of dogma on which it has been cast for so
long, and a new understanding of evolution as a process is
already beginning to form, in a manner that will eventually
supersede the scientifically stultifying language-culture of the
20th century.”

Carl R. Woese, and Nigel Goldenfeld, “How the Microbial World Saved Evolution from the Scylla of Molecular Biology and the Charybdis of the Modern Synthesis” [8-page PDF], doi:10.1128/MMBR.00002-09, p14-21 v73, Microbiol. Mol. Biol. Rev., Mar 2009.

cew