The Royal Institution - 2020-09-03
Cancer has been with us since the dawn of time, but it was only in the twentieth century that doctors and scientists made any significant progress in understanding and treating it. Kat's book 'Rebel Cell' is available now on Amazon: https://geni.us/qGShaa6 Watch the Q&A: https://youtu.be/5bOh40mwR58 Subscribe for regular science videos: http://bit.ly/RiSubscRibe Kat holds a degree in natural sciences and a PhD in developmental genetics from Cambridge University, and has spent more than 15 years working in science journalism and communication. She's an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker. She is the author of 'How to Code a Human' (https://geni.us/fiXsmn) and the critically acclaimed 'Herding Hemingway's Cats: Understanding how our genes work' (https://geni.us/regcAd). --- A very special thank you to our Patreon supporters who help make these videos happen, especially: Adam Leos, Alan Latteri, Andrew Downing, Andrew McGhee, Andrew Weir, Anonymous, Christina Baum, Dave Ostler, David Crowner, David Lindo, David Schick, Fairleigh McGill, Frances Dunne, Gou Ranon, Greg Nagel, Jan Všetíček, Jeffrey Schweitzer, Joe Godenzi, jonas.app, Kellas Lowery, Lasse T. Stendan, Martin Steed, Matt Townsend, Michelle J. Zamarron, Osian Gwyn Williams, Paul Brown, Paul Philippov, Rebecca Pan, Robert Reinecke, Roger Baker, Roger Shaw, Scott Edwardsen, Stephan Giersche, Tim Karr, and William 'Billy' Robillard. --- The Ri is on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TheRoyalInstitution and Twitter: http://twitter.com/ri_science and Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/royalinstitution and Tumblr: http://ri-science.tumblr.com/ Our editorial policy: http://www.rigb.org/home/editorial-policy Subscribe for the latest science videos: http://bit.ly/RiNewsletter Product links on this page may be affiliate links which means it won't cost you any extra but we may earn a small commission if you decide to purchase through the link.
Wonderful, enlightening, and accessible talk on an important topic. Thank you to Kat Arney for sharing your time to make this vid and thank you to RI for hosting this valuable talk and the Q&A. 🌸
She's a fabulous presenter. My eyes didn't glaze over one bit.
Amazing work! You definitely changed my perspective about cancer. Everyone should watch this and read your book. I cannot tell you how many shirts I have with the word "Cure" on them. After watching countless hours of youtube about viruses lately and tons of videos from the RI channel. Words like Cure have a new definition my head now. Thank you RI for literally giving me a way to expand my limited understanding.
I didn't even know that I did not know.
Now though, I know that I do not know.
IDK what the verb form of extinct is either. We Extincted the Heath Hen. Or maybe Extoonk?!?!? Lol.
The topic which I wanted the most & wanted to know more. Finally, you made it. Thanks 👍
Thank you so much Kat. Fascinating subject and so well presented. I have it on my YouTube channel playlist and have shared it with thousands of my patients.
Incredible presentation, I was fixed on the topic from the start, never realized that there are so many variations to solving this puzzle in regards to cancer. The analogy of farmers' pest control methodsas an approach to applying towards cancer control is revolutionary. Thank you for this insight.
Excellent presentation, thank you!
Superb presentation.
Thank you for the life long work.
Do more talks on evolution!!
The other night I had a nightmare that I got accepted into MIT but I couldn't go because of COVID and had to do it by teleconference... Congratulations on your Royal Institution lecture... hugs
A lot of work and research still needs to be done, my son had chemotherapy and immunotherapy and nothing worked to stop the colon cancer spread, he was only 18 years old.
Excellent presentation.
Excellent example of evolution within genrations of somatic cells of an indivudual only affects the owning individual, as opposed to the evolution of species which most people have in mind when they hear the word evolution. The former affects/works at rapid time scale compared to the later which requires many many generations to really affect the speciies. So in some sense former is fractal of later.
Então, na verdade , não é uma doença.
O câncer é uma fase da vida normal,como a redução da visão?
Pelo que ela falou só é uma "coisa" muito ruim porque se sabe que mata.
Muito bem explicado.
The most interesting thing to me in this talk was about us being a patchwork of mutated cells. Good to know.
Thankyou. I’ve been trying to explain this cancer business to fools and idiots for so long. Always was, always will be, hey?
This is a good discussion, and it carries on earlier writing, for example, that of Lynn Margulis. I believe Margulis specifically spoke of cancer as violating the contract of multicellularity in her study of the evolution of multicellularity. Not to say this detracts from Arney's presentation -- there are few new ideas under the sun. After all, Aristotle discussed at length the same tension between the individual and the whole, and much Greek tragedy was based on the same.
Another angle of thinking of this is that a good half of our existence has been as single celled organisms -- evolving a workable contract for multicellularity must not have been easy.
Very informative, thanks The Ri.
Well this is, really cheerful stuff thx Kat.
As someone with a pretty much 100% chance of developing a cancer due to the immunotherapy I have to take I was hoping for something on the more positive front.
Thx 😝
Of course I might well die of something else and not live long enough to get the cancer 🤣
So ultimately resistance is not futile?
Coronavirus has got the name "something else" recently😂 like Lord Voldemort🤣hope, you will be healthy and all the diseases will avoid you
How are you going to drive a cancer to extinction if the cells in the society of the body are randomly mutating?
Earlier in the talk you described how all the cells in a body/society were accumulating mutations as we age. Presumably these mutations are of many types, differing from cell to cell.
A better strategy might be to support the self repair mechanism in a cell. This mechanism is poorly understood, but if were fixed then random mutations would not have the opportunity to replicate.
Also given humans have about 20,000 genes and these genes cooperated in various groups to effect the development and function of the whole body, and these cooperative groups are little understood, that might be a better place to start.
We are a long way from understanding all the subtleties of our genome.
But tutors don't evolve they mutate and replicate rapidly.
I have active lymphoma, and dead metastatic pancreatic cancer, (Yay Keto and IF.) According to what I've been told and read, Lymphoma isn't actually a cancer, it's lumped in with haemotology, but it is entirely genetic. A disease of the immune system. We have Rituxemab, a monoclonal antibody, that goes after a specific protien C20 expressed on the surface of the cell, attaches to it and kills them by apoptosis,(programmed cell death.) This means the immune system cleans up the dead cells. The tumor in my pancreas is necrotic tissue. It just flat out died. Wasn't targeted, wasn't cleaned up.
The thing I found most amazing was that cancer can use autophagy, (essentially starvation) to keep themselves alive. This genetic pathway is so important it has existed since we were frogs.
Even more surprising is that the American medical system is really good, because it has kept a nation of chronically metabolicly unhealthy people, (less than 12% are metabolicly heathy) alive to a reasonable old age.
Sugar, (Glucose and Glutamine) it turns out, is lethal.
So yeah, if you're going to get cancer, you want to get Lymphoma, not pancreatic cancer.
If the growth of a tumor is evolutionary, what is the species which is evolving?
The tumor is not a species, it is a group of cells in which the mutations are not being corrected by the usual control mechanism. It is a breakdown of the cells self regulatory mechanism. Once a cell has mutated and the mutation has broken the control mechanism it is not surprising that more mutations occur and replicating in an uncontrollable fashion may be a consequence. This is not evolution. There are no offspring from the tumor. It is random mutations breaking one or more of the 5 rules of society previously outlined. These are good rules by the way. Mutation not evolution.
From what I have been reading about the field of aging I think this ties into the long standing challenges in aging research. After all epigenetic mutations are apparently the major driver of both as they are harder for our cells to repair. These various pockets of cells seem to start getting desynched from their differentiated task as epigenetic markers that should be on get turned off and those which should be off get turned in. What are the prospects of re-regulating cell patches when they are still only precancerous and haven't yet gotten entirely scrambled. How far away are we from applying genetic control programming to ourselves to keep things in synch? Either way this was an insightful talk that puts together a bunch of things I have read over the years into a fairly cohesive whole.
Also I remember reading about some extreme tumor cell lines where the chromosomes have broken down entirely I wonder can they break down to the point where they have effectively reverted to a near prokaryotic organism? Also I remember reading about a study that found biological parallels between sponge cellular differentiation and cancers.
Obviously you’ve been following David Sinclairs work. I was thinking along the same lines as you.
great analysis and presentation
Thank you for the informative review. Wondering why “food” was not mentioned as part of your studies, after all food is what we convert into energy as vitamins and minerals repair cellular damage. especially as you noted the importance of “whats inside that counts” hence ingestion and “keep a healthy tissue microenvironment” which is maintained by the quality of what we intake. Seems negligent overlooking a daily habit related to every inner and outer activity.
It's true that food can have an influence, however how it effects cancer outside of a few obvious carcinogens and antioxidants is not that well understood. Furthermore it's easy to overestimate the impact of food so it's probably something that needs to be handled with caution. I'd be curious whether it's in the book though.
I use to eat food that messed with my stomach and I started learning about probiotics and the gut. Detoxing your body from food that gives u a stomach ache is important. Probiotics will save u
I had always suspected, it’s not possible to make sure all your trillions of cells somehow have the exact same copy of DNA
Heath hens (and any other species) and a tumor are different things. The heath hens have a large degree of commonality in their genomes. Tumor cells, by your own description, have greater differences between their genomes.
The process of evolution does have something to offer in the control of cancer cells, but describing the growth of a tumor as evolution is misleading. Rampant mutation is a better description.
Scientists: Die when you should! .... Also scientists: Let's cure cancer and live forever! :-D
Great talk!
when your editor cuts your comedic bit about slime mould "buttplugs" so you make a 1:13:59 video on RI to get back at him🔥🔥🔥
I couldn't believe my ears she said that, I had to do a double take. I thought maybe she said bath plug, must've been bath plug, surely not that.
6:26 - Not exclusively animal, either. Plant tumours don't metastasise (because there are no cells moving through them as there are in animals), but they also stop performing their normal function and multiply uncontrollably, which fits the definition.
At 42:00 a histogram is displayed. It is implied that the probability of being diagnosed with cancer decreases after a certain age. Different ages for males and females. If I am reading it correctly, the peaks for the average number of new cases per year are 24,000 for females between 65 to 69 yo, and 32,000 for males between 70 to 74 yo. These numbers must be related to the population size. But is it the population in total or the population within that age range. If it is the later then the reduction in cases as age increases is due to the reduced number in the population in those age groups. No surprise here.
But what is the incident rate per 100,000? The curves for male and female peak in the age group 85 to 89 yo.
But again is the 100,000 within the age group or within the total population?
The histogram title says incident rate per 100,000 population, but that doesn't answer the last question.
And what magical thing happens at 90yo to reduce the rate of cancer? Is it death by other means, which would take individuals out of the sample space before cancer can be diagnosed and counted in the rate?
This may be a meaningful data display for medical cognoscenti, but for the lay person it is not clear.
Nice job, Kat, and some very innovative approaches, thx. Probably comes under chronic 'inflammation', but as a cancer survivor IMHO the role of 'stress' in our lives is also a key component, both in the cause and the cure.
i have medical background. i'm more interested in the question why naturally speaking, all the species (except two) have cancers. is there any evolutionary advantage to having highly productive cells that do not have reproductive limit? however, the presenter seemed to have skipped such interesting points to me.
I'm not very sure, but thinking from the point of view of evolution, we always want to have mutations or genetic changes that'll help us survive. Maybe these changes may not always be positive for eg. we lost the wings or probably much better vision on the way to become human. The same might be the case with cancer, they're probably changes that are part of evolution. And when we think about the two species who haven't developed cancer, one thing we can note is that they're like millions of years old, they havent evolved as much. I'm not sure if this makes sense, but this is how I thought of it.
I am also troubled why you are so surprised cancer is rare? Of course, yes, our cells are a patch work of mutations - some of which are defining features for cancer types. But we also know you need a set of mutations in specific genes to become a cancer tumor. If I remember correctly, 15 years ago we knew the set was a specific 7 genes; likely that number needs an update.
Before you reach that set of mutations, there are cancer prevention mechanisms including apoptosis (programmed cell death), and cells can be targeted by your immune system if it detects something wrong with your cells.
Thank you😊
My little boy is currently being treated for leukemia in the UK. Kat is exactly right, he is being given lots of different chemotherapy at different timings and although it is very long term treatment plan (3.5 years) I am pleased to say that they can't detect any cancer cells anymore. I also studied ecology at uni and find it surreal that extinction processes can be likened to treating cancer. Fascinating talk.
It is very inspiring for cancer patients to read about such a good experience🥰hope he will be healthy and happy always😊
Bromate is carcinogenic and after reading a report in the uk water its present but in a small amount which I think is 3 parts per million which is the standard allowed. My question is.. can multiple carcinogenic work together to cause cancer? And should be be looking at the collective carcinogenic elements together and regulating its amount rather than just one at a time.. I mean if you have one carcinogenic at 3 parts per million and have a second carcinogenic then that would make 6 parts per million and eventually putting all the carcinogenic together we would get many parts per million. The rate of cancer has shot up so please dont say it's been there since day dot because i remember it was 1 out of 5 people will get it then it was 1 out of 4 and now its 1 out of 2.. that's 50% of the population will get it. Now we also cant say well it's more recorded now because within our recording history it has multiply by many folds. I mean seriously at this rate what is there to say that 1 put of 1 will get it.
We all know how bromide with chlorine and oxygen works using sunlight which produces bromate (BrO3) (somehow) I'm not an expert but this IS being addressed in America but not here in the UK.
Should we be following suite. I think so.
My main question is can they (carcinogenic element in drinking water/because bromate is not the only one) work together to achieve a faster cancer state?
Why are you bummed out by this? Evolution occurs only because the DNA can mutate - which may be passed on to the next generation and is rarely beneficial. If you had completely stable DNA, evolution would not occur, because no errors can be passed to the next generation.
I would imagine, if you look at nature, you d find species with a short life span and high mutation rates that are very good at adapting to changes in environment or a wide variety of environments.
In contrast to those that become much older before having offspring and live in relatively stable environments over the species history.
does every mutation end with cancer?
I thought only mutations preventing apoptosis and uncontrolled cell division causes it
Only certain mutations cause cancer mutation is essential to evolution
no there can be neutral mutations as well as negative ones
I had to cry at 1.03 😭
51:13 - That drug is so effective it even gave the wall behind him a nicer colour.
16:53
Don't say that they are single celled amoeba
Amoeba is a amoeboid protozoan(different class) and slime mould is a different class of phylum protozoa
Our genomes are in a constant war, funny how ecological fitting fits with the tiny genomes
Very interesting
Does this mean that cancer is the outcome of entropy, meaning statistically a non cancerous organism after a certain amount time is less likely to occur than a cancerous organism?
Entropy isn't the best description as the damage is very specific with specific results. From an entropic perspective a cancerous cell is no different from a noncancerous cell. Furthermore cancers can be treated and entropy can't.
That's doesn't mean this. Entropy is always increasing, but controlled by the life on the Earth. But this control isn't increasing. The incidence of cancer in the world is on rise, which is caused by increasing life expectancy, increasing population and improvments in diagnostics.
"WE ARE LIVING IN A SOCIETY!"
I love the title
Extinguish? :-):-) Excellent talk.
matyourin - 2020-09-04
Interesting talk.
I was diagnosed with GIST 2019 in my duodenum and about 20 years ago that would have meant that I would be dead within a few years.
Thanks to genetic analysis and targeted therapy with Imatinib, the risk of getting the cancer back after the surgery my chances of survival are more like 80% (though no one wants to give me exact numbers, that is what I estimated having read all available material about this).
The progress we have made in this field is really impressive, thanks to means of genetical analysis and so on. They could tell me excactly which part of the genome was mutated (exon kit 11) and how well the treatment would work and if it would be necessary to switch to other medication and so on... all of the medication being the result of the recent progress made as well.