From the New Scientist (and also discussed on Carl Zimmer's blog): very cool new studies showing that a particular form of canine cancer can transmit itself from one dog to another. The neat thing is that it's not a virus that causes it, it's the actual cancer cells which are the pathogen. Pretty spiffy.
(Yes, life goes on, and is pretty good here. Just busy. Blogging will resume gradually.)
2 comments:
You think that cancer cells jumping from body to body is spiffy? I know it only occurs in dogs, but - gah!
Well, it only occurs in dogs that we know about... They suspect something similar is happening in Tasmanian devils, but they're not really sure.
And it's totally spiffy. Think about it. There's a lot of selection for becoming a cancer cell, right? But you're usually limited to the particular organism you're in. To become a self-propagating cancer, you need to 1) be a kind of cell which can get in contact with other organisms and 2) be able to avoid the immune system of another organism which you haven't ever been exposed to. No wonder it's rare.
Or at least rare now. I dare say that early multicellular life forms would have been under a lot of pressure to resist attack by out-of-control cells. It would be neat if that explained the immune system's really potent attacks on non-self, same species cells, eh?
Ah, science!
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