Do fungi lurking inside cancers speed their growth? | Hacker News Reader

Do fungi lurking inside cancers speed their growth?

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110 pointsLinuxBender81 comments

Sometimes I wonder if we're just giant machines built by microorganisms. It would certainly make an interesting story, along the idea of a robot discovering they were made by somebody else, which I believe has already been explored

> Sometimes I wonder if we're just giant machines built by microorganisms

I believe that we were well-organized colonies of bacteria was proven long time ago.

We are literally a unified collective of cells.

Prokaryotes, not bacteria.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-domain_system

Evaluates to the same concept of we being collectives.

Wow that was awesome to read. Biology keeps blowing its old theories out of the water. All of the excitement about rapid genome sequencing is being borne out, even tho you don’t read about bioinformatics so much. So bacteria are an offshoot from our lineage. We really are learning a lot so quickly.

I think you’re thinking of a Philip K. Dick short story. I’ll see if I can find it.

Edit: I was thinking of autofac, which is kind of like what you’re describing but arguably it was only a small plot detail.

People get downvoted for the strangest things on here sometimes. In this case it just makes me laugh.

Reminded me of The Electric Ant https://archive.org/details/PhilipK.DickTheElectricAnt

I have a hypothesis that commenters sometime interpret recommendations in this format ("I think you're thinking of X") as being presumptive, because it implies someone made a mistake in their thinking. I'm not trying to say it is or isn't, just that I've seen a pattern of similar posts downvoted, and this is my hypothesis as to why.

I'm the poster the parent replied to and I appreciated the comment, and yours. I don't know why it would be modded down

I've just been trying to remember the movie Prometheus, the discussion between David and Weyland at the beginning where Weyland explains he is David's creator - this, I believe, sort of touches on the same idea - learning someone created you, maybe not very deeply; I'll need to watch it again

There's also a short story by Stephen Baxter in Phase Space (a very excellent collection) called Dante Dreams where a researcher becomes aware of the dreaming consciousness of her own organelles.

I mean it's a matter of perspective but... we are aren't we?

Basically agree.

There is an important part in what is meant by "machine".

Mechanics, strictly speaking, is pervasive in but not sufficient to account for the life process.

There's something else going on that looks like classical teleos and both the cells and the organism have it.

There's interesting work to get teleos out of mechanics in far from equilibrium thermodynamics.. Prigogine, Kauffman, Wolfram, Deacon, England even Dennet.

In a sense that’s very true. However the biggest wrinkle is that most of your cells share a single common ancestor cell. If your body is a community of microbes, it’s mostly a village of close relatives, not a symbiote like coral.

Ah, I heard quite differently when including microbiome.

For example: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-43674270 "More than half your body is not human"

I believe that's incidental. There are abiotic mice which seem basically the same but require smth like 20% more calories in their diet for same metabolic level.

> most of your cells share a single common ancestor cell

We call her LUCA, last universal common ancestor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_universal_common_ancestor

> Sometimes I wonder if we're just giant machines built by microorganisms.

Wait 'til you find out that those "microorganisms" are themselves machines...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_machine#Biological

Yes, but with a twist: this giant machine worries about its future, its kids, its wealth, its financial assets.

Or tricked into worrying about that as a control signal to perform its main task in service of its microorganism operators ;)

Nobody in this thread has read Selfish Gene, apparently. That's the whole point of the book: That genes may as well have invented all of life to propagate themselves.

In this context, species conflict is like fleets of world-ships fighting total war.

That’s an interesting SciFi idea: the real world is digital, and digital beings have created a physical world to fight battle via genetic biological machines, which are effectively concrete data structures.

like the scene in Jurassic park

"It's a Unix system. I know this!"?

Genes are effectively biological computer programs.

Somehow akin to a fork-bomb

> That genes may as well have invented all of life to propagate themselves.

I think the point of the book was, that genes didn't invent anything. They were just the first self-replicating molecules. Everything else had to happen, because they were forced to exist and compete with clones and mutating clones of themselve – a game which we call life today.

Which is all subservient to its actual main task of increasing entropy. I've found myself cycling down the street wondering if my actions were all just an elaborate way of increasing entropy more quickly.

my machine just worries about food, and work to get food

All those are just for satisfying the urge to reproduce.

Reminded me:

> Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced. (Terence McKenna)

Animals evolved long before plants. What's crazy is that plants were arguably evolved by fungi using alga to farm sunlight

> Animals evolved long before plants

underwater: algae 3500MY vs sponges, worms, shells 800MY-485MY

out of water: plants 470MY vs millipedes, tetrapod 420MY-400MY

quora says animals https://www.quora.com/Which-evolved-first-plants-or-animals

Algae existed long before animals

And even on land, he seems to be wrong (or at least not up to date): https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2018/february/plant-life..., https://www.science.org/content/article/land-plants-arose-ea...

This is precisely my point - algae are not plants, they evolved a long time before

a nice example of cross evolution, random mutations of both life forms + natural selection, tasty seeds and animals eating them was a good combo

What about underwater plants? Life started in the water first didn't it?

> What about underwater plants? Life started in the water first didn't it?

They played the long game?

...except we didn't evolve from plants.

While animals and plants share mitochondria, they do not share plastids (chloroplast, chromoplast, etc.).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastid

"Invented by plants" does not necessitate "evolved from plants". Your TV doesn't contain mitochondria :)

Well i think invented is probably the wrong word moulded is probably better when you consider the fact that trees could be hundreds of years old before humanity proliferated and destroyed so many forests in last 1-200 years. It is not out of the question that animals could have evolved to serve trees as a 2-300 year old tree could see 100 generations of an animal

An interesting fact that I learned from the book Metazoa is that biological diversity was greater in the seas than on land, until about 130 million years ago, and then the explosion of diversity on land, at that time and still now, was because of a feedback loop that developed between plants and insects, with the insects allowing greater specialization among the plants, and the greater diversity among plants allowing greater diversity among insects. This was a true feedback loop, in that it would be impossible to say what the starting point was, the insects or the plants.

https://www.amazon.com/Metazoa-Animal-Minds-Birth-Consciousn...

until trees with their wood laid waste to this balance?

at least until fungi figured hoe to break lingin?

Your dates are off by 100 million years. You're confusing the late Paleozoic for the late Mesozoic. Trees came first, the explosion of land-based bio-diversity happened more than 100 million years later.

Life is just is a way for water to transport itself.

Life is, after all, what happens when you put together a bunch of hydrogen and wait a while.

We are all servants of the selfish gene.

Well, we are biological machines that would not survive without a spectrum of microbes (e.g., gut bacteria). And to your point, kinda, I sometimes wonder if they exist for us, or we exist for them.

Just ask yourself, who was first?

Asimov did a story “Hostess” that’s kind of along those lines.

that whole nanomachines sci fi, e.g. nanobots making grey goo or whatever is not as exciting if you consider cells are alreay microbits made out of protein nanobots

I recommend Stanislav Lem’s The Futurological Congress. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/733473.The_Futurological...

Beyond fascinating

Like the Extended Phenotype thing explored by Dawkins.

I think we need to credit the Swedish medical system here. They found that people who had taken oral Terbinafine (to treat toenail fungus) had a significantly lower mortality from prostate cancer. This has let to a bunch of studies in Sweden where terbinafine has been added to cancer treatment with fantastic results. This work adds a plausible mechanism for the results.

Very interesting. Are there any particular references you can recommend?

One of my undergrad research projects involved growing agrobacterium [1], which is a type of bacteria that can induce a de-differentiated tumor tissue in plants. This mechanism is useful for the introduction of exogenous DNA. Tumor tissue can then be transferred to a different media to grow into a typical root system, carrying your new genes along.

The bacteria essentially learned to signal to the plant which genes it needed to upregulate to produce the nutrients the bacteria wanted. It created an ideal environment for itself by tricking the host's genes.

Biology has evolved all kinds of ways to manipulate life to its end goals of harnessing energy and reproducing. I wouldn't be surprised to learn if some fungi evolved to use mammalian cells to upregulate biochemical pathways for energy production. Nor would I be shocked if this had the side effect of causing those cells to become cancerous.

[1] Side note : I've smelled a lot of different types of bacteria from growing them. E. coli is pretty neutral as far as bacterial smells go, but Agrobacterium has one of the strongest "foot"-like odors I've ever smelled. It's so distinctive.

Your comment reminded me of the Zombie ant fungus which is able to control the movements of ants...and makes them move to better environments that fit the growth requirements of the fungus.

When it's done it uses its host to go as high up the forest as possible to find a better position to release its spores more effectively.

What blew my mind was that some ant colonies have learned that the zombie fungi is susceptible to other fungi infections, which they use as kind of a defense mechanism against the zombie fungi infection. They quarantine infected zombie ants and put other fungi next to it because the zombie fungi otherwise leads to potential eradication of the colony due to it having such a huge spreading factor.

That's why a lot of observed colonies in the tropical forests seem to harvest different types of fungi (for food and defense?).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis

Reminds me of this doctor from Italy who claimed first that cancer and fungi have a close link and patients experience relief by a simple application of baking soda on the affected tumor. He was convicted of manslaughter for a patient who died.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tullio_Simoncini

> many of the fungal species in question are widespread, which makes sample contamination a serious concern, says Iliev.

> Both research teams got most of their tissue and blood samples from databases, so the samples were not collected with the aim of minimizing fungal contamination, says Bhatt. Although the researchers developed methods to filter any potential contaminants out of the sequencing data, she would like to see the results replicated using samples taken in a sterile environment.

Uh what.

Yep… perhaps they should make sure the results aren’t total bogus before disseminating.

This reminds me of the brain maggot patient that walked in the ER. After being cleaned up, they died the next morning. Apparently the symbiosis was healthy albeit disgusting.

Will be interesting if fungi end up slowing cancers and are actually fighting for the mycobiome.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycobiome

From reading Snopes, they say that the patient was in an automobile accident and was taken to hospital. They were cleaned up but died 3 months later. No evidence of symbiosis that I can determine. I presume he got in the accident because of his deteriorating mental state.

human body temp is high to thwart off fungi yet now fungi has evolved to handle high temp https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLndueWMub3... fungi evolves to higher temp due to climate change now can invade human body

My introductory biology classes informed me well enough to understand that fungal infections can weaken the body's immune systems, weaken the tissue, or spread themselves over an inflamed area, with unfortunate side-effects of generating pro-growth local environments. Any of these may lead to an incidental increase in cancer growth. What's more, cancer was such a rare occurrence prior to WWI, you wouldn't expect that cancer rates would be directly related to pre-existing fungal flora.

I'm pretty sure dissected tumors have eliminated fungal infections as integral parts of many (if not most) cancers. If it's not integral, fungal is opportunistic and likely unavoidable for most cases. I expect that these conceptual models are what makes these kinds of studies difficult to prove.

> cancer was such a rare occurrence prior to WWI

why do you say that?

Primarily because I don't remember the dates that coincided with the industrial revolution and mass production of cigarettes, alongside demonstrative analytics. I thought 100 years ago was a decent starting point for data.

I do remember that the first major pandemic of lung cancer started in the 1920s and the first controlled study of Cigarettes involvement with Lung cancer started in the 1950s - Hill & Doll in the US. A parallel study was started in 1951 in Britain, which ended in 2001.

Prior to that, cancer was routinely written up in case studies and submitted to journals as interesting medical cases.

Perhaps infection disease killed people who would otherwise have grown a cancer, as your timing coincides with antibiotics adoption and technologies, I believe.

Cancer loves sugar.

They generally disable the mitochondria and burn glucose in a much less efficient anaerobic process.

Areas with malnutrition and lower life expectancy would not grow them very well.

Is there data that supports this? (I don't even know where to look for a query of that sort)

The change in a cancer cell's glucose processing is known as the Warburg Effect.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warburg_effect_(oncology)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2849637/

Thanks.

Is there any study that areas of malnutrition have lower cancers? I imagine it's hard sorting out causality, with sugar in wealthy western style diets, and perhaps different environmental stressors (pollution?) elsewhere?

Not quibbling with your general point, but was cancer a rare occurrence before WWI on a like-for-like basis? Life expectancy was a great deal lower then - it's gone up by around 30 years (from just over 50 to just over 80) since then.

I would theorize that it was less detected prior to WW1, for obvious reasons.

That aside, life expectancy, afaik, includes new born illnesses, childhood illness and so on, and then as adults there were occupational related deaths. Those brought down the average then.

Did those who survived all those risks live as long as we do today? IDK. But there has to be data to figure that out, as the raw life expectancy then v now is likely misleading.

AFAIK fungi are extremely hard to get rid of. This is not a great news.

That depends upon just how much you’re willing to put yourself through. Compared to cancer, fungus is easy to be rid of.

Yeah but that's because cancer is basically your own cells with faulty programming.

they don't like dryness, but unfortunately our body is wet

Very diverse organism group, and often very tough, but at least it's distinct organisms with distinct characteristics rather than literally the same organism with some of the regulation broken. We have a few chemicals that hurt them while mostly sparing us, and more chemicals which hurt both but them more badly.

Many species of fungus are quite sensitive to high temperatures, which may have been one selection pressure favoring warm-blooded animals. Maybe an artificial fever or even local tissue heating could be enough to tip the balance in favor of the host in some cases.

At the very least it's a fascinating piece of information which is better to be in possession of than not.

Yep.

0. There aren't many antimycotics.

1. The extreme measures Mount Sinai needed to clean up after C. auris. (It has a 30% mortality rate.)

Many of the things that kill fungi also kill livers.

I think we need to credit the Swedish medical system here. They found that people who had taken oral Terbinafine (to treat toenail fungus) had a significantly lower mortality from prostate cancer. This has let to a bunch of studies where terbinafine has been added to cancer treatment with fantastic results.

so .. micro-dosing YES? no??

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