Too often we are inundated by alarmist reports screaming that the Ultimate Cause of Cancer has been found.  From cell phone radiation to red meat, practically every facet of modern society has been fingered at some point or another.  The reality of cancer is considerably more complex, as it may well have as many manifestations as causes.  Susan M. Love* recently made this case more eloquently than I have over at The Huffington Post and it bears repeating here:

Studying one chemical at a time in cells or rats will not be able to predict what the effects in women might be. As one basic scientist said to me the problem with studying women is that “they are so messy and we can’t control all the factors.” But it is this messiness, or complex web of factors that leads to breast cancer. And it is only by studying women in all their complexity that we will be able to figure out all the causes of breast cancer.

This kind of bluntness is much needed in the media, although it should also be noted that this complexity does not rule out the extant utility of animal studies.

*I respect Dr. Susan M. Love for not using her post as a promotion of her book, Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book, or to overtly push her organization, The Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation.

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You are never alone. Not even when you might want to be. Tucked away within the ~100m² of your bowels are ~10¹⁴ (there are ~10¹³ somatic and germinal cells in the human body) of your closest friends, collectively termed The Microbiota. They eat, spawn, conjugate, die, poop, fight, and secrete right there inside of you, unseen and mostly unthought of except when something is wrong. This system, the remarkably homeostatic mammalian gut, forms what is perhaps the densest and most complex microbial ecology on this planet.
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Recent research in PLoS ONE explored the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation in bacterial populations. It was found that cooperative behavior, along with metabolically costly systems to detect cooperative neighbors, evolves readily under conditions where the rate at which related bacteria are separated from each other is low. A summary of this research was published on Monday here. What follows is the transcript of a text-based interview with the principal author of this study, Dr. Tamas Czárán, who is affiliated with the Ecology and Theoretical Biology Research Group at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Eötvös University, Budapest in Hungary. His co-author, Dr. Rolf Hoekstra, is the Head of the Laboratory of Genetics at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

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About 5 years ago I was sitting in an introductory biomedical engineering course when the professor* suddenly got very excited and started to spin around wildly, demonstrating what he called “The Electron Dance”. Professor Matthew O’Donnell’s frenzied dancing promptly shocked all of us out of our mid-day stupor as he yelled out what each part of the dance signified. Within moments, he had all of us out of our seats doing the dance with him. Prof. O’Donnell was trying to teach us how magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) works, and his hands-on lesson has certainly stuck with me.

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