Friday, February 11, 2011

Definitions of Life and Cancer

There is an interesting slashdot discussion about how our definition of life and cancer may be about to change. That discussion inspired the observation below.


Life: The decision of about 4 billion cells to be 'you' for a while.

Cancer: The decision of some of those cells to form a 'tea party'.



1 Comments:

Blogger Gregg said...

This is a fabulously succinct way of looking at it -- its my current favorite meta-hypothesis about cancer. But I haven't studied cancer enough to know what evidence supports it (or disputes it). I *have* studied evolutionary science a good bit, which is where I formed the opinion in the first place.

I would love to see someone approach cancer treatment from the perspective of mitigating the "tea party" of a cancerous tumor and guide it to behave more harmoniously with its host rather than trying to kill it outright. Our current approach to cancer (to kill it) seems somehow crude and brutish.

But I don't have cancer...I'm sure my opinion would be a bit more militant were I the one with the tea partying cells.

4:01 PM  

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