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Injection / Injestion of chemicals only absorbed into cancer (or normal) cells, followed by Injection / Ingestion of chemical / virus that kills cancer when combined with or not combined with other chemical to protect normal cell or destroy cancer cell.

An umbrella cure would be difficult since there is a different type of cancer for just about every cell type that exists, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of such a cure or treatment anyway.

Combination treatments, w/ chemo / radiation.

What if you gave the cancer cancer? That might not work, since cancer affects the larger organism and not necessarily neighboring cells cells. But what if you could predictably mutate the cancer into something less aggressive. Nevermind…

How about water poisoning – overhydration? Might waterlogging less robust cancerous cells slow down their reproduction.

Or maybe dehydrating… or over-salting. Don’t know what the theraputic index would be for that.

Targeted body temperature manipulation? Would that do anything? Cooling or heating of cancerous/noncancerous regions for extended periods of time?

Or a new application for E.C.T. (electroconvulsive therapy), more focused on finding a low current, targeted frequency than shocking the crap out of everything. Could you find the resonant frequency of a cancerous cell, simultaniously using a salt to aid in the process?

Ultrasound therapy? Do they have that yet?

High pressure? Low pressure? Pressure flux?

To get sort of sci-fi, how about using antimatter? I know a guy who experiments with it, but producing it is a bitch.

I have no idea; just wondering what has already been attempted.

My family has a rampant history of cancer, and many of the family members that I have lost to cancer were dear to me. Most recently my Grandfather died of lung cancer in late december.If this treatment were available, and could have saved him and any other of my relatives, that would have been awesome.

These chemo drugs work as anti-cancer therapies almost solely because cancer cells replicate faster, triggering the errors in replication that lead to the cell death at a higher rate than normal cells, which are often more proficient in cell or DNA repair, with active checkpoint controls. Given the indiscriminant nature of many of the strongest cancer drugs, it is akin to a race to see whether a chemo treatment can destroy a tumor before the treatment causes irreparable damage to an important organ, necessitating a change in treatment.

Many of the newer treatments attempt to target tumors specifically. Anti-angiogenesis therapies, such as the Avastin (an antibody against a common vascular growth factor) fall into this catagory.

Inserting a gene into a “mollified” adenovirus is the most common approach to gene therapy, which I have always found curious given its lack of a lysogenic cycle. p53 (THE antitumor protein) is a good gene to insert, although one could make an argument for inserting MDM2.

However, and this is extremely important to note, viruses are VERY poor at preventing DNA errors during replication. Adenoviruses are dsDNA viruses, and are thus not nearly as prone to errors as retroviruses are, so the likelihood of a cancer-fighting virus forming the next HIV is negligible. However, the fact that this virus inserts cancer-related DNA makes for a serious concern that it could mutate to actually insert oncogenes or proto-oncogenes. A mutated p53 gene could realistically code for a mutated p53 protein that suppresses expression of “working ” p53 proteins while not actually fighting cancer. This would actually increase the likelihood of someone developing cancer. While its benefits might be immense, gene therapy is serious, dangerous stuff.

Oh, and my favorite term: Okazaki fragments.

Is that similar to pixie dust?

I didn’t know that there was a minimum age for residents of neverland to do that…