What is Cancer?

A new perspective

Hey again — great that you're here. In recent posts, we've delved deep into bioelectricity, collective cell behavior, intelligence, and immortality. But on a recent walk, I had a thought: why not bring it back to the human ailments permeating our planet today, in 2024?

We call them diseases, illnesses, sicknesses, afflictions. However, a view I've supported for a few years now is that these are symptoms of something deeper. We call it aging. But what is that really? If you were to run a simulation or script for an "infinite amount of time," it would likely break or malfunction at some point. Even stars eventually run out of fuel and implode under inward pressure — gravity, we call it.

All these angles have a common denominator: time. The only constant is change. A second ago was different from this second, which is different from now. Everything is in constant motion. "Everything Everywhere, All at Once." Nothing escapes time. That's what aging is. And with it come symptoms we call diseases: cancers, coronary artery disease, diabetes, dementias, to name a few. Every action taken in one's life compounds over time. Then we break. Or we die. Non-existence. Maybe that's how it should be. I don't really know, and it's beyond me to answer. But until we get there, why not live a life without the symptoms of time's wear and tear?

That's what I'm going to write about in a small series, examining the most common causes of death on our planet today. We'll break them down to their most basic parts, explore why they really happen, and see how we could apply some of this renaissance biology to solve them.

Let's go.

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Cancer — What We Have Been Taught

Cancer is generally described as uncontrollable growth and spread of abnormal cells in the body. Here's the conventional textbook definition: "Cancer starts when cells begin to grow and divide uncontrollably, instead of following their normal cycle of growth, division, and death. These abnormal cells can form tumors, which may be benign (non-cancerous) or malignant (cancerous)." It's usually followed by: "At its core, cancer is a disease of the genes in our cells. Changes or mutations in these genes can cause cells to malfunction, leading to abnormal growth and division."

This is how I've grown up understanding it, never truly questioning it. But you have to stop and ask: why aren't we all overrun with cancer? Think about it. We all start from a single cell that divides to become two cells, then four, and so on. These cells create our morphology — our shape and structure. They form arms, a head, internal organs. Everything we call life. Once we're born, they help us grow, regrow nails and livers, and heal small cuts. In this process, shouldn't we see "malfunctions" where cellular reproduction goes haywire and doesn't stop? An arm that grows uncontrollably or a liver that keeps expanding even after reaching its target state? Well, if that were the case, we wouldn't be here. Granted, this does happen to some kids at an early age, but in a million people, these cases would be outliers.

Something's amiss.

Cancer — A New Perspective

Michael Levin and a class of other scientists might upend the entire biology, physics, and philosophy fields by "simply" changing the perspective. As I've dug into this, always trying to put things in historical context, I've realised that one of the hardest things to do is change one's perspective. As a kid, sure, you look at the world through rose-tinted glasses and question everything. It gets increasingly harder as you age, your brain accepting things as common fact, life bogged down by the pressure of time. Not to mention the hate and ridicule one receives for trying to cause mind-boggling change in the collective hive mind of humans. History will remember these folks for many things, but their greatest achievement was changing perspective. Having the courage to do it. But most likely, they'll say as we say, "How did they think the Sun revolved around the Earth? Savages."

The perspective shift these folks brought to biology was that of goals and intelligence. A few facts emerged:

1. We all started off as a single cell

2. We're made up of a collective of cells

3. There is no "one" of anything because, as you dig deeper, we're just a collection of cells

Great, so we've got that mind shift. Let's stop being gene absolutists. Let's move our attention to the smallest unit of an organism: the cell. Now, we humans have goals. To build something. To care for our families. To create our own families. To see the world. Endless goals. We associate that with something alive, conscious, familiar. We pursue those goals through different means. We're not static. We experience "unpredictable" obstacles and challenges that we're somehow equipped to solve. We associate this with intelligence, perhaps. All these "we's" together form the collective, the human species, the hive mind, our society. All these individuals with their own goals, dreams, and lives somehow collectively keep everything going. There's order in most places on Earth. When you order something online, it magically arrives at your door within a day. When you eat out, people cook your food and serve you, and you use currency to incentivise this behavior. It all just works, even while each individual lives in their own microcosm, caring primarily about that microcosm.

Let's bring it back to the cell. The cell has tools and hardware (the genes) that give it the capability of doing something similar in its own microcosm. The cell tries to maintain its homeostasis (a stable environment), responding to stimuli (changes from one state to another) or dividing. Those are its goals. Kind of like us, the individuals. It exhibits a form of intelligence. But over eons, this cell became cells. A collective. The collective has much grander goals. They build a network of interconnected parts that work together harmoniously (for the most part and in shorter time spans). A form of collective intelligence allows them to solve complex problems at tissue, organ, and organism levels.

Similar to the individual, each cell has no clue how it fits into the wider whole or collective goal. The collective of cells is seen as capable of scaling up from individual cellular goals to larger anatomical objectives. This scaling allows for complex processes like embryogenesis (the first 8 weeks of human development after fertilisation), regeneration, and cancer suppression.

Cancer arises when cells disconnect from the organism-wide network that coordinates their behavior towards larger goals. I initially looked at this as cells going "rogue." However, it's better to visualise it differently. Normal collective cells have a broad "light cone," meaning they're aware of and responsive to (bioelectric) signals from distant parts of the body and can participate in long-term goals such as development and regeneration. When cells become cancerous, their "light cone" shrinks, which essentially means:

• Spatially: They become less responsive to signals from the broader tissue environment and focus more on their immediate surroundings.

• Temporally: Their goals shift from long-term processes (maintaining the organism for decades) to short-term survival and proliferation.

It "sees" less and acts accordingly. To keep with the society-individual analogy, it's when someone truly goes "overboard" and retreats, disconnecting completely from society. They revert to simpler, more "primitive" ways of being that we as a society wouldn't recognise or be familiar with. The person would cease to fit into society. If we all were like this, a society or community would never form in the first place.

How Does the “Light Cone” Shrink?

I've gone into detail in one of my initial posts that can be found here: Bioelectric Signalling and Cellular Communication. But the gist is that cancer, or the shrinking of cells' light cone, is due to a disruption in bioelectric states and gradients across tissue (collective of cells). Bioelectricity is the language of our cells, the software in computer science terminology. Cancer cells and other highly proliferating cells (cells that divide quickly and frequently) tend to be more electrically depolarised compared to mature and more inactive cells. Depolarisation refers to a change in a cell's electrical state where the inside becomes less negative relative to the outside. As cells specialise (taking on jobs as skin cells, blood cells, neurons), they typically become more electronically polarised (for those who want a deep-dive on this, I'll have it for you at the end).

Cancer cells actually resemble stem cells or progenitor cells. They can both differentiate to become any type of cell. The difference is that stem cells are a bit looser in terms of what cell they become, while progenitor cells are more defined/deterministic about what they can become. The point is that these less specialised cells have a more depolarised state. And it fits our picture that this state is associated with increased proliferation and a more "primitive" cellular type.

From there, one cell sees less, dividing faster and faster, losing the ability to communicate well with the complete network, seeing its surroundings not as a wider whole, but as an environment where it must survive. And then you start feeling a bit off. You might discover a lump that you immediately recognise as different from a muscle knot. You head to your GP. They run tests. They run more tests. And they tell you that you have cancer. If you're lucky, it's localised in a central spot. If you're unlucky, it has started taking up more area in your body, spreading. Competing for resources with your healthier cells. Then you can choose from a list of horrendous solutions in 2024 to rid yourself of this, and your reality is changed forever.

Now, that's how it happens. You might ask why it happens, which is exactly my question. There isn't a good answer out there, but in my mind, it's just the effect time has on any system. In the fight against entropy, it just starts working less optimally. However, I've also come to realise that it doesn't really matter. Our aim will be to understand the language and perhaps the goals of this collective because if we have that, we can introduce incentives. If we have incentives in place, we can get them to do what we want. A world without cancer. And all other ailments.

What’s the Best Course of Action?

There are two avenues we must consider with this new perspective in mind. One avenue lies in bioelectric diagnostics. Cancer diagnostics today are broken. You have to get to a point where you're sick enough or find a visible lump somewhere to go for a checkup. Then they'll run extensive diagnostics on you (time-consuming and painful) to realise it's too late. It's reactive medicine. Once you have it, we'll try to treat it. Additionally, we also have the problem of false positives today. False positives occur when a test incorrectly indicates the presence of a condition. This implies a great deal of resource expenditure, costs, and anxiety induced in the patient. Bioelectric diagnostics could use membrane potential as a biomarker:

• Using bioelectric properties (especially membrane potential) as biomarkers for early cancer detection and diagnosis

• Developing advanced imaging techniques with voltage-sensitive dyes

• Regular screening of tissues for abnormal bioelectric patterns

• Bioelectric profiling of tumors for personalised treatment

Bioelectric diagnostics could potentially democratise how we check ourselves for cancer, not only being accessible to the wealthy who can afford full body checkups each year.

The second avenue is naturally the therapeutic aspect. What we could potentially do here:

• Targeting ion channels to normalise membrane potential in cancer cells

• Manipulating membrane potential to potentially reverse the cancerous state

• Modulating bioelectric signalling to restore normal cell-cell communication

• Developing voltage-sensitive drug delivery systems

• Using bioelectric interventions to:

  • Target the tumor microenvironment

  • Address metastasis

  • Enhance immune response against tumors

These provide me with a starting point for action. These are actual hypotheses we can experiment on, model, and measure. In the coming weeks, we'll delve into the details of all these and explore how we could potentially get to work on this and share results here.

Stay tuned.

Consolidation and What’s Next

I don't know why, but something is brewing in the air. In all fields — math, physics, biology, history, computer science. In all these fields, we've attempted to break things down to their most basic constituent parts (e.g., measuring subatomic particles, playing around with genes). We've separated these fields into different disciplines to further specify what belongs where. To create some form of structure and order, I guess. Within the fields, we've created subfields, and subfields of those. Then we have so-called "experts" in each one, and none to truly paint the fuller picture. It's a very human thing to do. To attempt to simplify things to better understand them. It's also a human thing because our brains wouldn't be able to process or comprehend all that knowledge in one complete, full stream. However, as the perspective change of the collective dynamics of cells has taught me, perhaps the answers lie in the grander scheme of things, in the sum of the parts and not in the parts themselves.

I truly believe a consolidation era is ahead of us, combining fields into one to truly see "the truth." I think we were always meant to come back to this, to simplify everything through consolidation. Emergence, perhaps? Simple things combined make up a greater whole that has meaning. I was even having a funny thought the other day. What if AGI (somewhere in that distant future) will arise from the combination of all the servers, nodes, computers running — just as collective intelligence? The parts are just carrying out Claude 3.5 or GPT-01 tasks, but the collective has a larger goal that is yet to be presented to us. Well, let's see.

To move on from the philosophical, for the next few weeks we'll be digging into the following topics:

• The other top health-related reasons for death today: Cardiovascular ailments, Chronic respiratory ailments, Alzheimer's and other dementias, Diabetes, and Liver ailments. Our aim is to demystify, simplify, and see how we could solve them with our new perspective.

• Looking into Ivermectin and why it might have ways of killing off cancer.

• Going in-depth into our current hypotheses, committing to a detailed and measurable execution plan. And then execute. This will be the main focus as we move ahead.

Thank you for tuning in, and I know this one is long (jeez, it's long). But I felt it was of the utmost importance to paint the new perspective on cancer.

See you next week.

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Deep-Dives (For the Geeks — Feel Free to Skip)

• Membrane Potential Basics: Normal and dormant cells typically maintain a negative resting membrane potential (around -70 to -90 mV). This is achieved through the active cell regulation of ion concentrations across the cell membrane. This is done through the sodium-potassium ion pump. It's like a hardworking security guard at the factory gate who actively pushes sodium out of the cell and potassium into the cell. It has to use ATP to do this job, just as a guard would need food to work. It's always on duty, maintaining the right balance of ions inside and outside.

• Depolarisation in Cancer Cells: Cancer cells often have a more positive (depolarised) membrane potential, typically around -10 to -30 mV. This depolarised state is associated with increased proliferation and a less differentiated phenotype.

• Mechanisms of Depolarisation:

  • Altered ion channel expression: Cancer cells often over-express certain ion channels, particularly potassium channels.

  • Changes in ion pump activity: The activity of the sodium-potassium pump may be altered in cancer cells.

• Effects of depolarisation:

  • Increased proliferation: Depolarisation can activate voltage-gated calcium channels, leading to calcium influx that promotes cell cycle progression.

  • Enhanced motility: Depolarisation has been linked to increased cell motility and invasiveness.

  • Gene expression changes: Membrane potential can influence the expression of certain genes, including those involved in cell cycle regulation.

• Stem cell-like state:

  • The depolarised state of cancer cells is reminiscent of stem cells, which also tend to be more depolarised than differentiated cells.

  • This supports the cancer stem cell hypothesis and the idea that cancer involves a reversion to a more primitive cellular state.