Chromosomal Chaos and Cancer--And Our Broken Peer Review System
Dean
*This article bumped to the top. See update below.*
I must say, I'm geeked.
For years now I've recognized that Professor Peter Duesberg of Berkeley is one of the most wrongly-maligned scientists on the planet. He may not be right about everything but he simply does not deserve the kicking-around he's gotten.
I've also said for some time that he is responsible for a theory on what causes cancer that is almost certainly correct. I've been saying so for years, and often been patronized for it. But based on what I knew was going on behind the scenes, I repeatedly told Dean's World readers to watch for it, because it would be coming in the popular press.
Slowly, it's been happening, like a snowball building. We've all been watching it happen (here, for example). Now it has reached a new level: the latest issue of Scientific American has a major article by Peter on Cancer, and it pretty firmly establishes, to anyone who reads it, that the aneuploidy theory of carcinogenesis is very serious and may just be the most important development in cancer research in decades.
He is the man responsible for bringing it to light. No one can deny it, although many would like to.
An interesting sidelight is that, because of his AIDS heresy (Peter has never believed that HIV kills t-cells), he has been permanently locked out of any funding from our often corrupt, unaccountable, cronyism-laced funding system for scientific research. As Professor Richard Strohman recently stated:
More on Strohman right here. (And by the way, if you want to learn some things about the Human Genome Project that you've probably never heard--like the fact that it was a huge disappointment to a lot of people and that it caused a fundamental re-evaluation of a lot of previous assumptions--see Strohman's piece here.)I would like to take this opportunity to publicly congratulate my long time friend and colleague, Peter Duesberg, on this quite remarkable 'breakthrough' into completely mainstream recognition.
I would also like to point out that even the "Disclaimer" is to his credit. In much the same way as with the Rene Magritte painting that declares itself not to be a pipe, one cannot help but be caught on the horns of several logical and semantic dilemmas when encountering it.
The one that first comes to mind as particularly relevant to Peter and AIDS is that it does seem impossible that a man who might just be correct concerning something as complicated as the genetic basis of malignancy could be so totally wrong about something as straightforward as whether HIV kills T-cells.
America's system of funding scientific research has been labeled as "peer review." This is, much too often, a lie. In many cases--not all, but many--it needs to be called "Crony Review." Peter still to this day cannot get a grant application approved to save his life. This despite an exceptional record of achievement before he dared question whether HIV really kills t-cells. And despite the fact that over ten years ago he advanced what may well be the most important development in cancer research in a generation.
While millions died, our corrupt Crony Review system blew it big time. Peter's not the only one who illustrates this fundamental breakdown in scientific protocol, but he's probably the most egregious example.
A scientist who has made major contributions in important areas, but questions the consensus view, should not be punished for it should he? Yet Peter has been, repeatedly.
It is high time that the American taxpayer stops being scared of scientists, and starts asking pointed questions about how our tax dollars are spent on this funding system. As Al Gore is so fond of noting:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
It's not conspiracy. It's the bureaucracy, stupid.
Government incompetence married to corporate self-interest: it's not a good thing.
In any case, without that sideline: check out the latest Scientific American, which should be on news stands now. Hated dissident Peter Duesberg is on the cover because no one can deny that he's fundamentally changed the face of cancer research. And how cool is that?
You read it here first.
*Update*: For some reason an earlier thread linked to this one by Celia Farber disappeared. In any case, I got some emails from Professor Duesberg and put them into the comments here.
Related Posts (on one page):
- The Broken Science Funding System
- Chromosomal Chaos and Cancer--And Our Broken Peer Review System
Modern science, and men, often think they (it)understand(s) almost everything about everything. But when you assume that you presently understand everything this only betrays how small your vision of the future and how blind you are to the past.
Victory should go to the innovative and he who most closely comes to the truth, not to he who assumes he already understands everything for such men likely understand very little, other than the fact of how much they think they understand.
If we figure out how those two are related I imagine we'd be a lot better off.
There are solutions. Reforms would include ending the anonymity of the peer review funding boards completely--which everybody knows is a fig leaf anyway, these people typically know and recognize each other's work. Also making the reviews multidisciplinary so that mathematicians and others in somewhat related fields but who are disinterested in the results can give their input. Also an appeals process is needed for researchers who believe they are being discriminated against.
Really, honestly, this is all obvious stuff that anyone in corporate or government management should be able to look at and say, "yep, those are good ideas." I'm not the first to make these and other useful suggestions, either.
What continues to alternately amuse and/or infuriate me (depending on my mood) is how the establishment players always play dirty on this and start bringing up "conspiracy theories" and "attacks on science" and whatnot. Ridiculous. That's just a cowardly evasion. This is about a broken system of funding, and a need for greater accountability to the taxpayers that their money is being spent wisely, and that corporations are not benefitting inappropriately, and that conflict of interest issues be addressed more openly and honestly.
Here's a good neutral historical perspective in Fortune on the failed War on Cancer.
Of course, ironically, there's a huge disincentive to cure cancer. If you cure it, you put a lot of cancer researchers, scientists, drug manufactururers, charities out of business.
It's much better, financially, to endlessly research it, not cure it. Think of a massive lawsuit like US v. Microsoft -- endless massive billable hours for lawyers, who hope the case never ends.
It's kinda like the outdated NAACP, struggling for modern relevancy on civil rights -- "Yes, we've come a long way, but there's still a long way to go."
Though, in my view, moving in 150 years from slavery to Jim Crow to the obnoxious Don Imus, to me, shows astounding progress in the right direction.
Anyway, it's good to see Scientific American break the embargo on Duesberg's work.
HBarnes
There's much reason to believe that genes only very rarely cause cancer. That cancer seems to run in some families would not really say much to refute that.
I must also point out that while someone may be right about one subject, it doesn't mean he's right about another.
They've only been investigating these--let's call it one and a half--causes for that entire time.
Like any bureaucracy with no external check, they became self-sustaining and monomaniacal on one idea.
you've got it exactly wrong. There is a great financial incentive to curing cancer. Just ask any cancer survivor how much it cost to beat the disease. Whoever comes up with a panacea (or the closest approximation) would be an instant gazillionaire. Although it would put a lot of other researchers out of work, why would that be a disincentive to be THE person or group or company to find the cure and patent it?
The NIH research bureacracy is what does most of the research on what causes cancer. And the fact is that they've only been looking at one or two essential causes of cancer for 30 years. Constantly evolving, but always based on the same assumptions.
As I see it, the corporate powers are only interested in selling new patentable drugs. The government funded researchers--those at the top of the heap especially--are mostly interested in prestige and in keeping their quite comfortable livings. They convince themselves that their theories are sound and will produce fruit one day, and so every meager advance they show is just more proof that what they're doing is noble and valuable, and that every lateral thinker who suggests that their theories are wrong at base is an arrogant prick and probably stupid or crazy.
Which of course suggests that the real need is to find a way to reform the system without making everyone in it feel threatened.
Dear Mythos,
Although I don't like to correspond with a myth, I would like to make one point here.
The genetic challenge in cancer research is to determine whether the numerous non-genetic causes of cancer, like A-bombs, cigarettes, dioxin, asbestos, etc., alter the genes or the chromosomes to generate cancer cells.
At this point all cancers are aneuploid, having abnormal chromosome compositions. I have been unable to find a single diploid cancer (in contrast to hyperplasia).
By contrast, no mutant genes have yet transformed a normal diploid cell into a diploid cancer cell - despite 30 years of trying!
Regards,
Peter D.
Dear Jesse Hill,
You can have genetic disposition to aneuploidy, i.e. either chromosome non-disjunction or breakage, as well as to gene mutation - as well as to nearly all other phenotype alterations.
Thus genetic disposition does discriminate between chromosomal and mutational cancer.
If mutational cancer were correct, you should see lots of diploid cancers as most mutations do not alter the karyotype. That, however, is not the case.
Further if mutations were necessary, you should be able to transform normal cells to cancer with the respective mutant genes. This has been tried now for 30 years, but I do not know of a single case where this proved to be correct. Do you ?
Regards,
Peter D.
I ran this as a lecture aid once— gave everybody a choice between two "research papers," and gave chocolate to those who made the "correct" choice. Needless to say, everybody got chocolate the second round, except for one friend of mine who was allergic. The look on his face as I pulled out a sourdough round instead was priceless...
It's my understanding that aneuploidy should trigger apoptosis. Do we have any understanding of why it's not doing so? It seems to me that there might be a general cure somewhere down those lines.
From another angle, as supposition:
Aneuploidy is a symptom of cancer. It is the result of one or more closely related processes involving mechanisms within the cell. One possible cure would involve detecting the presence of these mechanisms and directly or indirectly triggering apoptosis.
As a computational challenge, how much power would it take to brute-force model this problem? As an off the cuff guess, I'd say probably on the order of a million times what's required to model a single protein. Less than 50 years until we can brute-force this.
you've got it exactly wrong. There is a great financial incentive to curing cancer.
No, you've got it exactly wrong. There is a great financial incentive for the 1 person/firm to cure cancer, to reap the massive financial rewards to himself.
But, what about the rest of the hundreds of thousands of cancer researchers? They'd be stuck out in the cold with ---NOTHING.
So, its better -- collectively -- to toil away for years on all these fruitless, misguided, cancer paradigms (viruses, oncogenes, etc). That way, everybody gets a good share of the research pie.
On the merits, there are no diploid tumors. This means aneuploidy is either a cause or a consequent of cancer. This poses a huge political challenge to the cancer establishment, because if they accept this, it demonstrates their spectacular errors in logic and judgment since 1971.
How could they focus on the genes all these years and miss the chromosomes?
And, How many more cancer patients will die, while they continue to re-entench on unproven theories, when aneuploidy is staring them right in the face -- on the august pages of Scientific American, no less.
HB
In the meantime, no one can produce solid evidence, after more than 30 years and tens of billions of dollars, that mutation of "oncogenes" causes cancer.
Read the rest of Duesberg's piece.
Indeed it's kind of sad to see my brother Aziz defending this massive, spectacular failure of the system. Tens of billions of dollars and millions of person-hours thrown at a hypothesis that's still incredibly weak. One under-funded scientist who still can't get a grant to save his life turns the world on its ear. And there's no problem here?
At minimum the aneuploidy hypothesis says that with work we could detect malignancy and kill it much, much sooner than any current system.
But more than that, it suggests that practically everything we've done in cancer research for 30+ years and after tens of billions of dollars has been drilling a dry well.
The "hail Mary" play of the establishment of the moment is to try to claim that genetic mutation causes aneuploidy. Good luck, fellas.
Is that so heretical a suggestion?
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.