Why would that many people have so much vitamin A ?

How could I determine if I’m in/out of this group

What are accident victims?

Any other similar books ?

In general, we don’t do curative surgeries for metastatic cancers. The thinking is that it is has spread that much away from where it started, there little point going to cut out where it started alone. Are we then to cut out every place it has spread to and every how it got to those places.

We do do palliative surgeries if warranted but the intent there is not to cure, but to relieve some symptoms and transiently improve quality of life.

Please direct any specific questions you have about your sisters case directly to her doctors

If you are trying to do market research, this is the wrong way

The internet archive has a copy of the epub, but I have no idea if it’s a legal copy or piracy:

https://archive.org/details/the-biology-of-cancer-3rd-editio...

The method of printing is not the major cost differential in a book. Hardbound or softbound, the production costs don’t differ all that much. That is why ebooks are not substantially cheaper than a printed book.

When kids have to buy a textbook for school the price goes way up

Stretched dodo hide, tanned and prepared by blind monks.

Cheaper material than this

https://www.amazon.ca/Hyperart-Thomasson-Akasegawa-Genpei/dp...

the hopes and dreams of the publisher, author probably sees a very small %

Same as Necronomicon, surely.

paperback $127.30 here: https://www.amazon.com/Biology-Cancer-Robert-Weinberg-dp-039...

ebook $100.64 here: https://www.vitalsource.com/products/the-biology-of-cancer-r...

Liver cells

Not the GP poster, but some answers:

> Does SV40 cause cancer?

Yes, in a range of animal models at least.

SV40 can 'immortalise' cells, turning off regulatory functions which prevent uncontrolled division, which is an important part of carcinogenesis. This has been shown to contribute to cancer in experimental systems.

> Did and does SV40 inadvertendly inside the Polio Vaccine in the late 1950ies and 60ies cause cancer?

The evidence suggests not significantly, although it's impossible to rule out for some unlucky individuals.

The SV40-exposed cohorts rates of cancers don't differ that greatly from unexposed groups, so we can say with certainty that the rate is much less in humans than seen in laboratory systems. There were suggestions of differences for some cancers, but these are heterogeneous and often confounded, and the general consensus now seems to be the effect was small if not zero. I don't think there's a definitive answer on why - possibly the exposure was sufficiently low or the virus was not effective at infecting humans to significantly affect the carcinogenic processes.

> Does the Pfizer proces 2 SV40 promotor in the Covid Vaccine cause cancer?

Certainly not by the mechanism intact SV40 causes cancer.

That depends on the production of particular SV40 proteins which interfere with cell functions, which aren't present in that promoter.

> Does DNA contamination in general cause cancer?

In general, no.

Cells are constantly exposed to both native and foreign DNA fragments, and have plenty of mechanisms for dealing with them. Even if fragments were somehow incorporated and expressed, most are not inherently carcinogenic.

> I don't know if you're friendly enough to address these isssues. Probably not.

A fantastic closing if the goal is to make people not answer your questions. I don't know if you're friendly enough to explain why you made your comment so hostile. Probably not.

You are ignorant and disrespectful and i'm higly disappointed from human to human.

"friendly enough to address these issues".

He is not part of some research group who is researching this type of topic. You assume he is a bad faith actor with your "probably not".

Either accept the status quo / research on this topic, or do the research yourself but don't take some potential conspiricy shit to hn by cheap shooting someone else with your 'probably not'.

And if you really struggle with this type of things, get help.

What's your objection exactly? Those are standard prices for even semi-modern technical books.

https://ambystoma.uky.edu/teachers_materials/axolitbook/Axol...

For example, consider how frequently people lose a limb, and further consider the ratio of survival to death for injuries in that general ballpark. Then balance this quality of life improvement, for those who survive, for those injured in the first place, against the fact that all people with such a biological capability will almost certainly experience a significantly higher rate of cancer. Because in a nutshell cancer is uncontrolled proliferation while regeneration is controlled proliferation. (It would be very interesting to know the rate of incidence of various cancers in axolotls if they lived anywhere near as long as a human.)

Not "pressure to lose this trait" as much as "no pressure to improve it"?

As anatomy gets more complex, the process of getting it from "arbitrary heavily damaged state" to "functioning state" gets more complex too. And mammals are a bit more anatomically complex than placozoa.

If your entire body is a hollow sphere 4 cells thick, "repairing arbitrary damage" is very simple and natural. When you have bones, blood vessels, nerves, muscles and tendons, all wrapped in skin - all of which have to be restored correctly for a lost limb to function well? The gap between "just plug the holes" and "restore the function" grows, and the complexity of implementing usable regeneration goes up massively.

Humans can repair most of simple tissue-level damage well enough. The complexity equivalent of placozoan regeneration is in place. Rebuilding complex anatomy is what's often unimplemented. Seems like that is the part that requires some novel adaptations rather than simply not deactivating the mechanisms that are already there.

I read a book on epidemics where some modern theories on death were essentially its selected for to force potential infecting organisms to keep starting over on mastering a given genetic environment. Ones grandchildren are more likely to survive the successor plague than you are, hence a population with excessively long life would have died out. I think the evidence was from long lived trees? (Pandemic by Sonia Shah).

Exactly, limbs are quite large portion of the body, that's why many think salamanders would have no problems with regenerating all other smaller body parts. And that's not the case.

Even still, if we were able to continue on current aging trend, including food availability and whatnot, for another hundred thousand or million years; what evolutionary pressures exists that would make our biology able to live even longer than our current status quo?

This isn’t correct. For example, when Edmond Halley created the world’s first life table in the 1690s, he estimated that approximately 5% of his city’s adult population was >70. Getting old is not new.

evolution doesn't act on the species or even individuals, it acts on the genes which is why it looks like evolution acts on the individual and its close family unit.

people have a hard time grasping this concept for some reason.

my favorite example to illustrate this is the trait of being poisonous. if evolution cared about species and then every single one would be poisonous and all predators would have to hyper specialize in prey (arms race between a particular poison and its resistance). it's precisely because it's so difficult to elicit a benefit from this strategy for the lineage that it's so rare. almost always a mutation in coloration has to happen to set the lineage apart from the others first. and then the lineage has to survive the disadvantage long enough.

Regeneration is unlikely to warrant eternal life. In the wild, most animals die before even showing serious signs of aging. Even if regeneration increased lifespan, poorly adapted individuals would still die.

We have on evolutionary scales lots of predation damage by the lizards. Thus a turtle with 300 can still give birth, while we can not.

Also, the liver metabolizes a lot of toxins, and some cells die in the process, so there was a strong pressure to replace them. That pressure was our ancestors insisting on eating toxic things like mushrooms and spoiled food until it didn't immediately kill them.

Huh, another reason to eat more spinach I suppose.

> Your liver makes platelets

Megakaryocytes are primarily bone marrow cells.

Hello! I hope you're going ok :)

Possible? yes. Practical, not really. Living liver donors (at least in Australia) are rare, because (unlike kidney donations) it's an extremely risky procedure for a living donor. My donor was a deceased donor, and I'm forever grateful for their (and their family's) decision.

There are extremely good security reasons for it.

Even if we assume your body has a foolproof is_same_species() test, your neighbors' cells may:

1. Be healthy, but have the wrong priorities or behavior, so that they start doing the wrong tasks or sending the wrong messages in the wrong places. [0]

2. Be healthy, but they're just a creepy flesh-mask a parasite has constructed around itself.

3. Be individually hijacked by viruses, and your body won't have the same baseline information to tell that they've deviated from your neighbor's standard.

4. They may be fully human, but gone feral into a transmissible tumor [1].

____

[0] This is actually a risk from pregnancy, as overambitious fetal cells leak into the mother.

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

With very few exceptions, if there is something in you that isn't you then you would be better off if it was dead.

In this case nature was just indifferent to transplants as they weren't a thing even 100 years ago.

As others have explained, foreign cells usually meant trouble, so fighting them by default was a good choice. And there was no pressure to allow transplants specifically, because they didn't exist.

Also, (I think) you usually need a transplant later in life, after reproduction, so too late for evolution to affect it. So even if we had transplants for millions of years, it might not have made much difference either.

There is zero inherent way to tell a malicious group of proteins and RNA or cells or biological process from a non-malicious once. They are both the same exact activity. Your body is killing cells all the time, so even cell death isn't a certain indicator (though is an indicator in the innate immune system and cells dying the "wrong" way will activate a response)

The only useful signal is "This wasn't here yesterday". Your body generates B cells with a little sensor that has it's own special systems to have especially randomized sensor activity. Your body is generating random binding sites because there's no rules for what a hostile protein would look like.

Then it prunes these B cells by showing them a bunch of proteins your body is capable of producing, and killing any cell that signals for proteins your body normally has. This leaves you with a bunch of B cells that have random sensors tuned to only trigger for things that weren't in your body yesterday.

This is great, because it's a proactive measure against evolution. It's the core innovation of the adaptive immune system, and a massive advancement in biological self defense.

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

Cells from someone else will have some different markers and proteins than found in your body. Human genetics are 99% the same yes, but there is massive diversity in the remainder.

Note that this constraint is not biological in nature! Any general purpose "programming" environment cannot differentiate between "Hostile" and "Benign" by function or structure alone! The body, like many smart cybersecurity groups, made an allowlist. Though the way that allowlist is made is fascinating

I'm a kidney transplant patient myself. Your cells have HLA markers to distinguish your own cells from foreign cells. That is to prevent your immune cells from attacking your own body. This also makes it harder to find a organ match.

The reason I needed a kidney transplant is because of an auto disease called IgA Nephropathy where the IgA antibody has a small defect that causes the rest of the immune system to attack it and the whole mess clogs up the kidney filters over time.

The way your body detects foreign cells is the same way your body detects foreign cells. It detects anything that doesn't have your, specific, randomly-generated at conception, friend-or-foe markers.

To deal with:

1. Bacteria

2. Parasites

3. Cancer

In all these cases cells that are "other than your own" are in your system and need to be eliminated, in the case of cancer it's your own cells but with significant mutations, as far as I can tell there is always an immune response although in some cases it is actually counter productive.

I asked ChatGPT if it is OK to an explain a joke without being asked to do so, and She said no.

I don’t know how adult 22 is considered but yeah. A younger sibling got it when they were ~13.

When we noticed the signs and went into the ER a few of the (younger) doctors thought it was Type 2, while the attending knew it was just late onset Type 1.

Just like a ton of other autoimmune diseases.

It's so rare in adults it's got the cute name maturity onset diabetes of the young (MODY).

Isn't that why it got renamed from juvenile diabetes?

Know someone who developed type 1 diabetes in his 30s.

I don't know about the Greeks but I know a lot of ancient cultures thought the liver was the most important organ (probably because it's full of blood).

For example in Persian poetry the word liver is found pretty much everywhere you would expect to see the word heart.

"You are my liver" is a nice/romantic thing to say to this day.

There's really no knowing why the Greeks chose liver, or some specific Greek chose liver.

It could have been because the liver was regenerative and they were using the titan with the regenerating liver as another reference to humanity, or it could have been as someone pointed out because predators like to eat the liver first, or it could have been that you can take damage to the liver and live for hours afterwards in agony whereas the same amount of damage to the heart or lungs is apt to cause death to come much quicker.

Perhaps there are undiscovered variants out there were the eagle or a serpent or some other animal attacks his genitals, or his eyes.

But at any rate the Eagle ate his liver, it means nothing in particular, and at the same time it means every particular interpretation we can place on it.

I'm thinking the Greeks chose liver because it is the first thing that many predators will eat from a kill - large, more nutrient-dense than almost any other tissue, and relatively quick to access.

I thought they chose it because it tastes great with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.

Why would liver signal defiance?

It seems it might be more a combination of whether it's a social animal and how much help / how much danger the offspring is actually in. There's not a whole lot that fucks with elephants, and not a lot that successfully fucks with the young ones. And female elephants universally live in groups and collectively all protect each other. Female lions tend to do the same, and also have very few things that fuck with them.

Conversely human offspring is especially weak and incapable and susceptible to harm, and experiences a lot of threat even within the same species.

Not sure where that are of whale and chimps fit into that - flukes can also happen I guess.

Compared to most animals that spend their entire day foraging for food, it's not too bad. Adapting to eating dense and very nutritious animal flesh is a great time-saver, and as we didn't evolve long fangs, we had to learn to use tools instead, and the rest is history. (mixing cause and effect here for dramatic purposes)

that's absolutely maintenance, without it you have a total system failure in a week

quite the delightful maintenance too

until you get old and goes the opposite direction

Well, so much for that discussion.

What did people do 500 years ago?

But if you want to avoid withdrawls.. you better harvest and store that honey. And that wheat- all that beer, all that mead. Just to stop shivering.. the addiction of civilization.. and all you need is earthen kegs and a cellar.

Hacker news is dedicated to 'tech' and I'm looking for advances in biology.

You can't build a moat and make money on good nutrition, you make money with patented drugs and therapies, that's why.

Yeah makes sense. It might also be a different culture, software likes hacking and open source, while serious medicine not so much.

thanks :)

"While questions remain regarding the precise extent, rate, and functional relevance of adult neurogenesis in the human brain, as well as important methodological considerations, multiple independent approaches now converge in support of its persistence throughout adulthood."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S193459092...

I’m pretty sure that’s been debunked and they normally do.

And onions are mildly toxic to cats and dogs. There is a lot less shared responses as to what is toxic or edible across species.

Basically every flavor compound in an herb or spice we eat is a poison directed at insects, microbes, or other creatures. (much less every medicinal or psychoactive compound found in nature)

Did you know birds do not have receptors for capsaicin? They can eat any pepper and it doesn't affect them. So if you see a bird snacking on a pepper that's red or greenish-yellow, wrinkly, and has a pointy end, well ... watch out

Doesn’t that validate my point? The liver needs to deal with this stuff unless you manage to throw it all up again.

This right here is religious propaganda

[dead]

>It seems like there would be some advantage to some creatures of not aging, or having individuals who have significant longer life spans.

There is, if there were no advantage a whole lot more species would die immediately after reproduction like the octopus.

Many simpler organisms are vaguely immortal.

>It's easy to imagine a world where nature might want to keep the alpha lion around longer than the others so it can have more offspring, for example.

The utility of genetic diversity puts a lot of pressure against this.

Evolution is literally just the observation that there are lots of things that self-replicate.

That's it. That's the entire thing. Plus some nuance about things that self-replicate faster than other things...

It occurs at all levels. Amyloid protein in Alzheimer's patients is self-replicating. So are cells. So are individual parts of cells. Sometimes things replicate by being parts of a larger thing that replicates, sometimes they don't. It's all one big chaotic tangled mess with no particular purpose or design. Human cells evolve, so do humans, so do human societies. So do rocks.

Indeed, I’ve heard so many people misunderstand it because of this type of wording. Like there is still some plan and series of steps we’re following - which really misses the whole point and why it’s worth knowing in the first place

Oh, fair point, I did the pathetic fallacy (too). Beneficial thing, then.

Says who? Please expand on this discrediting.

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He's right, it's garbage and we should know enough (it's high-school level education) to reject it without an explanation. The fact that we don't is actually scary.

Evolution does not care about creating perfect bodies, that's not how it works. Aging and death are superpowers of an unique arrangement of matter, not bugs.

We know diabetes and other issues come from changes humans introduced in our diets, not faults in the evolutionary process.

The text draws from a weird mixture of religious influence (it's not explicit) that lowkey estabilished things should be perfectly designed (in science, mentioning "design" is an issue; fine but aged badly in science communication). It's just not the correct framing to be educational about how our bodies work, and sets up wrong expectations about what we know of nature.

[flagged]

There's nothing wrong with speculation on HN. Speculation is intimate with curiosity, and curiosity, not correctness, is the guiding value of this site.

It may seem odd to demote correctness in that way, but it doesn't mean we value incorrectness. Correctness is good, just not at the top of the hierarchy. Curiosity (specifically, intellectual curiosity) is what we're optimizing for: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....

We value the freedom to meander curiously. Some paths turn out to be wrong [1], but that is how new things are learned, and it's a good way to spend time. People are allowed to be wrong on HN as part of figuring out what's true [2]. Truth is crucial, but one ought not to squeeze the throat of speculation so tightly that wrong things aren't allowed to be spoken, or fun to be had.

[1] not saying the OP is right or wrong - I have no idea - but the article looks like the fun kind of meandering that has a place here.

Edit: https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=meander - "from Greek Maiandros, name of a river in Caria noted for its winding course". Is there a better website than etymonline?

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11655206