Just Finished Reading The Cancer Code by Dr. Jason Fung

I recently discussed the book Life in the Fasting Lane, with Dr. Jason Fung, a nephrologist (kidney specialist), as a co-author.  I just finished reading another book, a 2020 solo work of his, titled The Cancer Code. It explains the dynamic processes involved in this devastating and complex disease as well as the history of how medical science and physicians have evolved its definition and treatment.  Dr. Fung elucidates three major stages of how cancer has been viewed: first, it was seen as an uncontrollable growth and reproduction of the body’s cells in a particular place.  Second, it was seen as mutations on the gene that made cells cancerous.  And now, the growing consensus is that, while the first two views are correct, they are relatively limited in usefulness, and that cancer is an atavism, that is, reversion to the cell’s more primitive unicellular organism form through a shedding of the genetic material within it that hitherto put it in cooperative relationships with other body cells, making it a competitor cell instead of a cooperative cell. One of the factors leading to this transformation is a chronic period of stress on the affected cell, not killing it but rather forcing it into fending for itself. Also, the author discusses different types of cancers and the process involved in metastasis, which is the spread of the cancer cells to other parts of the body. Fung stresses that cancerous cells mutate much more readily than normal cells, and that there is a strong statistical correlation between diabetes, obesity, and some cancers…the hormone insulin seems to be a strong contributing factor as the sugar it causes to be released in the body serves as fuel for the cancer cells and their reproduction.  I don’t want to make it sound as if Dr. Jason Fung is making simplistic points…he goes into a lot more detail about this scourge than I’ve been able to stumble through with this review.  I recommend this book…you’re bound to come out of it more enlightened about cancer, its nature, causes and possible ways to combat it…

Podcaster's Notions about Gut Feelings Interesting but Possibly Flawed

On a recent Mindset Mentor podcast of his, personal development coach Rob Dial discusses his opinions about intuition, more specifically what he terms "gut feelings", in making decisions about others and situations.  Announcing that it was science, he claims that we all have a separate nervous system from our brain-controlled Central Nervous System (CNS): the Enteric Nervous System (ENS), that exists with more than 500 million neurons within the walls of our digestive system.  This much I go along with...Michael Gershon discovered the ENS in the late nineties, according to Dial.  What I do have difficulty automatically accepting is Dial's notion that connects the ENS, or "second brain" as Gerson terms it, with the idiomatic expressions "gut feeling" and "butterflies in stomach" as if it's giving me independent information.  Dial goes further and says that the ENS, unlike the brain which often focuses on the future and past, is wholly rooted in the present and makes itself known through feelings.  The part of his show that I did get was that we shouldn't carelessly dismiss those feelings and signals...regardless from where in our bodies they arose.  If you want to believe that you're a multiplicity of thinking systems, go for it...I tend to think that it's a lot more complicated and interrelated (and interdependent) than that.  Rob Dial is good in his "lane" of self-improvement advice and coaching, but he's not a scientist...neither am I.  Just because he or I may have learned a little about something doesn't qualify either of us from going downtown with it and attributing special narratives where they haven't been shown to apply...

Tuesday's List: Mass Extinction Events Over the Eras

I was recently discussing astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson with my son Will and noted that he is going into production for another Cosmos television series, which will be aired in 2019.  Can't wait! I mentioned that my favorite episode of Tyson's 2014 series...which was based on the late Carl Sagan's 1980 Cosmos series and updated it...was the episode about the Permian Extinction, which wiped out 96% of all species of Earth.  It got me thinking of looking on the Internet for a good list of the major mass extinction events that have occurred over time.  On worldatlas.com, I found a good list, which you can access through this link: [link]. To this list I added another event: "Snowball Earth", which occurred around 650 million years ago.  And now here's that list of mass extinction events, going from earliest to latest...

SNOWBALL EARTH (650 million years ago)
All life at this time was unicellular and ocean dwelling...the extinction rate thought to be high, but how high is unknown.  The causes of Snowball Earth...scientifically termed "global glaciation"...are in dispute as well as its duration and the extent of the ice covering.  But it was most likely ended through volcanic activity that sent carbon dioxide upward to heat and melt the ice...

ORDIVICIAN-SILURIAN (439 million years ago)
According to the article, 86% of life was obliterated.  The suspected cause of the extinctions was glaciation and falling sea levels.

LATE DEVONIAN (364 million years ago)
75% of life lost.  Occurred possibly over thousands of years as land-based plants released nutrients into ocean, depleting oxygen through resulting algae.

PERMIAN-TRIASSIC  (251 million years ago)
96% of species made extinct when a network of large Siberian supervolcanoes erupted, starting a chain reaction of carbon dioxide...and then methane...release into the atmosphere, overheating it and poisoning the oceans.  Not a good time to be on Earth...

TRIASSIC-JURASSIC (199-214 million years ago)
Various reason, including a possible asteroid collision, are given for this change that occurred over a relatively long stretch of time.  It paved the way for the advent of the dinosaurs...

CRETACEOUS-PALEOGENE (65 million years ago)
You've probably seen the scene portrayed on TV where the Tyrannosaurus Rex suddenly looks up and sees a fiery asteroid plummeting and striking the Earth.  This is the famous event that rendered the large dinosaurs extinct and opened up the Earth's ecosystems for the evolution of mammals.  Thank you, asteroid.  But about 76% of life was destroyed during this extinction...

HOLOCENE (now)
Through human activity and its resulting climate change, the extinction rate has sharply increased.  It's bound to get worse...

The Ancestry Genetic Test Fad

A while back they began to show these DNA testing commercials on TV, Ancestry.com being the major company doing this.  In one of their ads, a man who had taken on the persona of what he deemed to be a "German" because he had a German-sounding name took one of these tests.  The result came back with little-to-no German ancestry, but a lot of Scottish...so he began to wear a kilt.  Oh, come on, folks...do people really take this ancestry thing that seriously?

Forgive me for being a little skeptical about this latest craze of people sending in their DNA samples to the big company for a fee and then getting a readout as to where their ancestors came from.  For one, I believe that there is a built-in bias in the process because of the names of the ethno-national groups and the criteria for dividing them from one another: since the company wants a saleable product pleasing to its customers, it will make familiar distinctions among the different groups that they can easily recognize.  Secondly, I wonder about the accuracy of it all, assuming that the DNA sample sent in is pure to begin with.  I wonder what the results would be if I sent in samples to various competing companies...how much would they vary from each other? And thirdly, all my life I have been educated to believe that, under the skin and outward appearance, we're all just fellow human beings.  The notion of "race" that we've been snowed under to believe for centuries isn't a matter of objective reality, but rather one of subjective perception.  After all, geneticists have concluded that our species is relatively very homogeneous in comparison with others, with very little genetic diversity between the so-called races and ethnic groups.  And lastly, I wonder whether people engage in genetic testing in order to classify themselves...at least partially...as members of a group that they want to identify with for whatever personal reasons...

The way I see it, you and I are what we are, and our respective lives, the things we have gone through, screwed up, learned, and accomplished create individual tapestries that are far more interesting and significant than any pie chart showing our ethnic origins...

Weekly Short Story: Successful Operation by Robert Heinlein

Twentieth century science fiction writer Robert Heinlein is probably best known for his novels Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but he also wrote a multitude of short stories.  Being a strong anti-fascist when Hitler and Mussolini had their followers in America before World War II,  Heinlein put his philosophy of liberty into his stories and never wavered from it after the war when he became equally anti-communist.  Successful Operation was one of his earliest works...from 1940...and is also very short, four pages long.  I'm happy to be the proud owner of Off the Main Sequence (SFBC Books, 2005), which is an extensive collection of short stories that tended to be left out of other collections of Heinlein's...this tale started off the book...

Heinlein had Successful Operation first published with a different title, "Heil!", in a pulp fiction magazine under a pseudonym, "Lyle Monroe".  That original title gives a hint about the story, as a racist dictator meant to be Adolf Hitler is in a health crisis with an undesirable solution.  His pituitary gland, which is located at the base of the brain, is diseased and he will only survive with a transplant.  The only surgeon available who can perform the operation, however, is Doctor Lans, who is implied to be Jewish and is in a concentration camp.  Lans and the Leader meet, and the doctor lays out his conditions for the operation, which include the restoration of his fortunes, passports for his family and himself, and that the operation take place on foreign land away from the Leader's control.  Begrudgingly, the dictator accedes and the operation is set.  The healthy pituitary gland to be transplanted belongs to a fellow inmate of Lans, and the donor agrees that he would rather have a sick pituitary and be free than have a healthy one and be under oppression.  Then the operation takes place and it's a success...only one problem, though, the Leader and the donor have both been secretly whisked back to their country.  And thus is the setup for the predictably outrageous ending for such an abbreviated story...

If our consciousness and identities are based within the strict confines of our own bodies, then where are they located there?  The obvious choice would be the brain...but beyond that it's an open question.  Robert Heinlein takes a deep dive off the board of speculation and comes up with an answer that would easily fit well in a Twilight Zone episode...I wonder whether that might in fact have been done... this story just seems familiar to me, as if I had already experienced it or something very similar before.  And now you can read it through the creative commons license via this link to the Free Speculative Fiction online site: [link]...

Weekly Short Story: Mimic by Donald A. Wollheim

Sometimes short stories can be memorable even though they barely take up any space, while others...equally impactful...can resemble short novels in their length.  One of my favorite science fiction anthologies is Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories 4 (1942), DAW Books, 1980.  It goes back to 75 years ago with some of the best short fiction of that year, and I plan to review both long and short pieces from it.  This week I'm focusing on the six-page-long tale Mimic, by Donald A. Wollheim...who incidentally was the publisher of this series...

In biology, mimicry occurs whenever a species of life evolves to imitate the form, appearance, and/or motion of another...usually with the resulting benefit of escaping being eaten...or enabling it to eat others.  In Mimic, the unnamed narrator, employed as a museum curator's assistant, explains this fascinating aspect to biology very cogently...and then leads into the story.  There is a heavily cloaked man in black living in the heart of New York City.  He has lived there for years upon end, never talks to anyone, keeps to himself...and has an inordinate fear of women.  As far as anyone can see, he bothers no one, and people have pretty much become accustomed to his strangeness.  But the title of this story is "Mimic", and it's pretty clear that it relates in a major way to this character.  It is the unexpected twist at the end...common with these very brief stories...that gives it a much greater impact...

Although Wollheim was referring to mimicry as a product of natural selection enabling those life forms using it to survive in the wild, there is another type of it used in society.  People want to fit in and "survive", be it at school, work, or other social environments...but in order to avoid standing out and being subjected to rejection, many choose the tactic of "winging it"...acting as if they are as competent and integral members of their group as they think they should be to attain acceptance.  Yes, we humans have our own version of mimicry...

And now you can read Mimic for yourself...the copyright must have expired, for it is readily available on the Net: here is a link to it on the UNZ.org site: [link]...

Just Finished Reading The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Siddhartha Mukherjee is a distinguished cancer biologist who has a great talent that few scientists possess: the ability and passion for sharing his often very specialized and complex field with the general public.  A few years ago he wrote the highly-acclaimed book The Emperor of All Maladies, which was about that dreaded disease of cancer.  To do research into cancer these days necessarily involves one in the closely related and heavily overlapping field in biology known as genetics.  Mukherjee has in turn written another great popular science book: The Gene: An Intimate History, which covers this very interesting topic from its scientific history, controversies throughout the years, important breakthroughs along the way, and the future in genetics...

Mukherjee interspersed his narrative about genetics with personal accounts from his own eastern Indian family's history of mental disorders...that his family line on his father's side seemed predisposed toward developing schizophrenia and bipolar disorders pointed to heredity and the engine driving it: the gene.  He then recounted the history of modern genetics, concentrating heavily on the pea experiments of Gregor Mendel in the 19th century.  He covered the various competitions among scientists during that time and in the decades following to understand the principles of heredity as its study ultimately came down to the structure of the DNA molecule and how it interacts with its mirror RNA version and with proteins and other substances to transmit genetic information.  Along the way, bumps in the road to the truth have occurred, and the author focuses on these as well.  One such bump was the eugenics movement of the late 19th and early 20th century, which attempted to extend heredity to intelligence and apply it to racial types...with disastrous political and social consequences culminating in the travesties perpetrated not only in Hitler's Nazi Germany, but within America as well as women were forced into sterilization based on eugenics-based assessments.  Another bump was the Lysenko movement in the Soviet Union, which claimed that the gene could be directly altered by change in environment, with the result being the setback of that country's agriculture through policies enacted in line with this fallacy.  Ironically, in more recent years it was discovered that environmentally-induced changes could be inherited, but not by changing the actual genetic information but rather by the presence of proteins and other substances that could "turn on" and "turn off" specific genes.  This phenomenon is essential to the new subfield known as "epigenetics"...

This book delves fearlessly at times into pretty technical information, especially with regard to the chemicals involved with genes, their composition, and the processes resulting.  There's no doubt in my mind that I would have gotten more from the book with a better background in biology...unfortunately that's one area in my own education (of many, I'm sure) in which I am sorely lacking.  Oh well, our good author was wise enough not to dwell too long in technical narrative...which I recognize was necessary to effectively present this work...and would eventually go into an area that I could more readily grasp...

Mukherjee is very concerned about diseases and how much they can be traced back to the genetic code...the composite of all genes within humans, along with their arrangement, being known as the human genome.  It turns out that some diseases point to a single, specific gene (like Huntington's and sickle-cell anemia)...but most of them seem to be the product of more than one gene, acting together and often in conjunction with environmental factors. As genes responsible for birth defects like Down's syndrome were discovered, it became expedient to perform prenatal tests for pregnant women regarding the likelihood that the baby would be born with the defect.  And if the tests came back positive, then the question of abortion came into play.  As a matter of fact, the more we learn about how human traits specifically correspond to elements along the genome, it becomes more and more an ethical/moral question: how far should we go in determining our genetic future, both as individuals, families, and as humans collectively?  The rise in stem cell research and its applications to the alteration of the genome in order to "improve" it also raises the important question and its partner: what constitutes improvement...and how, with our still fledgling knowledge in this growing field, do we know that we aren't unintentionally creating genetic structures that are more harmful than helpful?

My very first introduction to the field of genetics was a Bell Science movie titled The Thread of Life, starring that "bald guy with glasses", Dr. Frank Baxter, back in 1967 when I was in the sixth grade.  Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Gene: An Intimate History is definitely a huge step up from that...but it still keeps me firmly planted as a non-scientist.  But I do feel that I am, if only a little, closer to understanding some of the issues that seem to continually arise about genetic research in the news every few months or so.  I recommend this book, and I may well come back to it from time to time...

Just Finished Reading Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door

A Wind in the Door, by Madeleine L'Engle, and which I just finished reading a few days ago,  is the second book in her TIme Quintet science fiction series aimed at young adults and teens.  Like its predecessor, A Wrinkle in Time, the Murray children of Meg and Charles Wallace, along with their friend Calvin O'Keefe, are involved in another adventure to save the world from evil forces threatening it.  But unlike the first book in this series,  the focus here is on microbiology, with the Murray kids' mother, a microbiologist, being the science expert instead of their father, a physicist and whose adventures were featured in the previous story, which involved planet-hopping through a device called the "tesseract".

The crisis in A Wind in the Door focuses on the human mitochondria, found in each cell and which are indispensable to life.  A disease that infects them has spread among the population, and young Charles Wallace catches it, his life in peril.  In the meantime, Meg has discovered that her hated former school principal, Mr. Jenkins, has tripled in number, all three identical on the surface.  But two of the Mr. Jenkins are Echthroi, which go about destroying things by "un-naming" and emptying them (also called "X"-ing). Meg is tasked with the problem of naming which of the three is the real Mr. Jenkins, and she discovers that love for this thoroughly unlikable person is the key in accomplishing this.  Then, with the help of a dragon-like cherubim, the real Mr. Jenkins, and a visiting human-like Mr. Blajeny to teach them, Meg and Calvin (along with the cherubim and Jenkins) shrink way down in scale, recalling to me the movie Fantastic Voyage (but much, much smaller), and enter the mitochondria of Charles Wallace to determine what is causing the sickness.  There they encounter a rebellion of young "farandolae" (one of them, named "Sporos", is also a pupil of Blajeny), which according to the author's imagination are in symbiosis with the mitochondria and are needed for their healthy function.  And who is stirring up the trouble among these mouse-like creatures?  None other than those troublesome Echthroi...and it's up to Meg to quell the rebellion, defeat the Echthroi, and save the life of her little brother...

There's a lot of science in A Wind in the Door...much of it speculative.  I can see how Madeleine L'Engle's stories can spur young readers to take a greater interest in areas like biology, physics, and astronomy.  But the main emphasis is more about ethics and philosophy...and how love is the driving force in life and creation...

Snowball Earth, Among Other Prehistoric Disasters

I've always been interested in the origins and development of the Earth, both in its geological context and in that of the evolution of life.  I am also a subscriber to Netflix, at least the streaming Netflix which much too often comes up severely lacking with its offerings of movies and shows.  This time around, though, I found on it a four-part television series titled Prehistoric Disasters that explored the Earth's distant past through four key disasters that struck it over the eons.

The four "disasters" were the formation of the Moon through the collision between early Earth and a minor planet, the 25-million year long lapse into a completely ice-packed "snowball" status covering the entire globe some 650 million years ago, the eruption of a supervolcano in what is now Siberia causing a chain of events leading to excessive global warming and mass extinctions 250 million years ago, and the hypothesized collision of an asteroid with Earth about 63 million years ago causing the end of the age of the dinosaurs.  I was especially interested in that strange "snowball Earth"...

Earth throughout its span of existence has gone through an extensive cycle of ice ages, when ice glaciers would flow far south of the polar regions and into more normally temperate climate zones.  But 650 million years ago the ice passed a threshold of latitude and went on to cover the planet with ice, and very thick ice at that (several hundred meters).  The cause: depletion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to loss of this gas as it combined with solid material through excessive weathering from the then-single, huge continental mass lying on the equator and then settled on the sea bottom, far away from the atmosphere.  The advance of the ice sped up the process of global cooling because the ice's reflectivity of sunlight was much higher than the liquid ocean's, sending the sun's heat back out into space instead of absorbing it into the Earth.  Life at that time, for billions of years ongoing as a matter of fact, was composed of unicellular organisms, mainly bacteria.  Nearly all of the species died out, leaving only those few that could adapt through evolution.  After the ice cover eventually receded from the heat generated by massive volcanic eruptions 25 million years later, life began evolving rapidly into more complex forms...but only after the "snowball" period.

By all accounts, the "snowball" period in our planet's past was a singular, nonrepeating event.  That bothers me a little and keeps me from completely accepting it, even though there seems to be empirical evidence that it occurred.  I would have expected at least of handful of other "snowballs", too, in the records.  But if it was truly the only time that Earth was completely encased in thick, thick ice...and for millions of years at that, then to me this has to be the most incredible period of its past.