

"Metazoan 1.0" --The 1.6 Billion-Year Evolution of Cancer - majkinetor
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2013/07/the-billion-year-evolution-of-cancer-an-ancient-program-pre-loaded-into-the-genomes-of-all-cells.html

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transfire
Does this mean, if that portion of our genome could be removed then cancer
would not be possible?

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majkinetor
I guess not.

I think that point is that cancer is very hard to cure because its cells
revert to the basic software of life, the ancient one, which made everything
we know today and without which life is not possible, hence it can't be
removed. So cancer is another form of life where different species of single
cellular life evolve in its microenvironment. I say different species because
most cells forming cancer have different genetic characteristics because of
extensive aneuplody.

The authors argue, tho, that Warburg effect (reliance on glucose for energy
instead oxygen) is consequence of reverting to ancient genome. I wouldn't put
it that way - I bet that cancer cells rediscover ancient genome rather then
revert to it, because, we know that cancer cells do not behave uniformly and
behavior and physical characteristics change even from layer to layer inside
same tumor.

I would expect that given such scenario the only way to fight cancer is
physically removing them. Most of the things we know about cancer are in line
with this - immunotherapy, strengthening the immune system to recognize and
physically destroy cancer cells is currently most promising strategy and other
things that are not compatible with life development make a difference -
caloric restriction for instance or folate removal.

