James Crowley: Can Cancer Cells adapt faster than Evolution explains?
James Crowley, Professor of Medicine Emeritus at Brown University, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“Can simple evolution explain how rapidly cancer cells learn to deal with first the hostile local hypoxic environment then the vagaries of bloodstream transport, immune attack then new forms of chemotherapy?
I think we should consider re-thinking about. successful metastasis, immune and drug resistance not as the simple passive phenomenon known as treatment selection according to Darwinian natural selection theory but as an intelligent choice of now highly evolved new niche creating leaders among the cancer cells.
We must consider thinking of immune and drug resistance cancer cell leaders as the result of cancer evolving by using an intelligent adaptive evolutionary strategy, allowing the formation of more aggressive cancers as a response to anticancer drugs to
- change themselves to better fit a new environment,
- then shape the environment to better fit their needs, or
- choose a new environment that better fits.
To find support for cancer intelligence, the apparently now fairly eccentric view of cancer as an intelligent system of collaborating and computing cells deserves much more serious attention.
The reductionist view of metastatic cancer as a chaotic unintelligent monster will eventually need to be replaced as seeing cancer cells that have learned how to successfully break away from the primary tumor as being a rather now very intelligent entity such that we and it must cease pursuing mutual complete annihilation but be taught to learn that ultimately at that point some sort of uneasy coexistence may be the best pathway for some to follow.”
More posts featuring James Crowley.
James P. Crowley is a Professor of Medicine Emeritus at Brown University and serves as a volunteer physician at the Rhode Island Free Clinic. He has held leadership positions in the medical community, including past President of the Rhode Island Medical Society and the last President of The Providence Medical Association.
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