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Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

Almost every thing we do is passed on to and alters the next generation we give birth to, even if only in a very subtle way.

My question would be, why wouldn't cancer continue to evolve with our immune systems? We're not abolishing the process that leads to cancer, or making cancer impossible. This therapy kills it after it comes into existence. What would prevent a modified immune system from being passed on, and what would prevent an evolution on the kind of cancer that said immune system is susceptible to? That is, why wouldn't the next generation of cancer become that much more challenging to fight, requiring constantly evolving the therapy?

Not asking to be pro or con, but genuinely curious about this.

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> What would prevent a modified immune system from being passed on

The fact that modifying your immune system doesn't automatically modify the part of your DNA that encodes how to create an immune system. Children don't inherit your experiences, they just inherit your DNA. (For the same reason, cutting your leg off doesn't cause your offspring to have a missing leg.)

This is incorrect in several ways.

1) Acquired antibodies are passed from mother to child.

2) Epigenetics

This is incorrect in several ways.

1) Ignores obvious intention of the author

2) "several"

How exactly is cancer adaptive anyway? Think about how natural selection works: genes that are better at surviving and propagating themselves survive and propagate themselves. Bacteria evolve because they're an independent genome that infests other organisms but cancer is just a failure mode of biology.

Cancer is adaptative in the same way. Tumors are populations of cells with variation (forget the part where your teachers said tumors are composed of clones, that's garbage). When you apply a selection, a small number of the cancer cells survive. Usually there are several different subpopulations. Then they grow, you end up with tumors that are mixed populations of different subtypes. Then the cells start growing again.

Saying cancer is just a failure mode of biology isn't given cancer enough credit. It's more like cancer is a side effect of complex organisms, which is nearly impossible to eliminate, without also eliminating a number of highly advantageous features of cells.

But they're not transmitted from host to host so the only way it would be passed from patient to patient is if a patient himself had genes for resistant cancer and that somehow made him more likely to spread his genome.

Perhaps because most people reproduce before their body evolves a superior cancer?

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