The other day I read a headline in the paper about how we will once and for all win the battle over cancer in the near future with new methods in the medical field. One would hope. But I’m personally sceptical (no surprise to ppl who know me :)) that that will actually happen. This has been the dream of some of our smartest researchers for the last 25 years – or more. Nevertheless, the further we looked and understood the mechanics of the desease the more we splintered the battle field into smaller domains. Some cancers have great known treatments, whereas others are pretty much lethal no matter how we treat them with the methods known to us today.
Which leads me to the thought, or more the question, if we maybe approach the problem incorrectly. To use an analogy from computers, it appears to me that we try to solve the latest software computer glitch with a hammer, screw driver and a soldering iron (chemo and radiation) – Not very likely to yield good results.
What if the cancer is more of a software problem, a genetically misprogrammed cell that needs a patch. We currently don’t have the means to fully understand what the acid/base sequences on the DNA really mean and also have very limited means to manipulate them. So in order to fix cancer for good, we first need to understand how DNA actually works – a monumental challenge by itself – before identifying the exact failure mechanism and then going about fixing it by modifying the DNA of said cells. The mechanics of the last step is currently experimental at best, but technology is evolving fast in that area – so I’m hopeful.
The bigger challenge in my mind is to fully understand how the DNA works. This is more of a information technology and computer science problem. It might even be the case that we currently don’t know the math that is required to understand the coding behind it. As an example I’m thinking of the fourier transformation and the discovery of imaginary numbers, that lead to many breakthrough advances in science and engineering. An engineeer equipped with these mathematical tools can solve problems that were unthinkable to solve before the discovery of these techniques. The same might be true for genetics. Maybe we’re just a couple of centuries too early to grasp how DNA is actually encoded mathematically. We can look at it, stare at it, but fail to understand it fully because of our limited mathematical means.
If that is true, more interdisciplinary research is required to accellerate the application of the most sophisticated mathematical methods to new and thriving fields like gen technology and nano technology. In my opinion even the traditional Software development should be able to advance beyond the “more of the same, just bigger” approach of today.
Until that happens, keep your weight down, excercise, and eat healthy! Never a bad idea anyway. 🙂