A new book by MIT Press stresses the urgency of approaching cancer from new angles. Some are completely new. Others are 100 years old and never given the attention they deserve.
Bernhard and I discuss his motivations for taking on this project and how complex systems are much more subtle than we humans prefer to believe.
Podcast Link: https://evo2.org/podcasts/rethinking-cancer-with-bernhard-strauss/
In September 2021, a dozen entrepreneurs gathered in Chicago and had a seminal 3-day discussion and commissioning for solving the world’s most thorny, intractable issues.
Bob Regnerus was there and here we discuss what happens when entrepreneurs shift their focus from creature comforts to curing the most wicked problems of the world.
Podcast Link: https://evo2.org/podcasts/how-to-solve-the-worlds-most-intractable-problems/
A very rare clinical oncologist plus theoretical biologist describes the landscape.
Doru Paul of Cornell University is one of those very rare people who has both treated over 10,000 cancer patients as their doctor and simultaneously holds a kaleidoscopic view of a huge range of research, theories and literature.
Today we talk about the many competing models and their pros and cons.
And, finally, he answers the question: “What kind of medical policies would you put in place if you could start your own country from scratch?”.
Official version: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0079610721000419
Free version: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uFgqYwpGoiMTCv_4fDjhXzYxKgzdtTdc/view?usp=sharing
Credentials: https://weillcornell.org/doru-m-paul-md-phd
Podcast: https://evo2.org/podcasts/what-exactly-is-cancer-anyway-2/
John Lennox is an Oxford mathematician who is the author of the new book Cosmic Chemistry. He’s written many books about the relationship between science and religion and has debated Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.
His new book candidly surveys the current state of evolutionary theory. Notable chapters include reviews of work by Denis Noble and James Shapiro.
In this conversation that we had on the Oxford campus, John recounts his history of asking the big questions.
LINKS:
Cosmic Chemistry on Amazon
John Lennox’s University of Oxford Faculty page
John Lennox’s Website
The “How the Light Gets in Festival” will be featuring a debate between my mentor, friend and scientific hero Denis Noble and renowned atheist Richard Dawkins.
They throw down at 10:30 AM BST Saturday June 4.
A description of the debate topic is below. You can watch live by going here
https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/festival-passes
And scrolling down to “Online Tickets.” You can purchase the package that best suits your needs.
If you prefer to watch the recording later…you can view it at iai.tv with a subscription.
The Gene Machine:
Dawkins‘ Selfish Gene has been hugely influential, both within evolutionary biology and in the wider public sphere. It’s a beautifully simple story: genes and not organisms drive evolutionary change. But critics argue the story is simplistic. The effect of a gene is not always the same and as is dependent on its host and the cell environment. DNA does not come neatly divided into individual genes. And in 2010 the renowned biologist EO Wilson and others revived the case for group selection. Some are now arguing that the Selfish Gene paradigm is holding back medical research.
Is it time to move on and acknowledge that Dawkins‘ theory is not the whole story? Might his theory be making a fundamental mistake in reducing humans to machines? Or does the Selfish Gene remain a remarkably powerful and accurate account of who we are?
World-famous scientist Richard Dawkins goes head-to-head with celebrated biologist Denis Noble as they lock horns over the role of genes over the eons
Seize the day,
Perry Marshall
From Evolution to Curing Cancer: Our 7-year Journey
In my book Evolution 2.0, published in 2015, the topic of cancer gets two pages. There, I said, “You’ll never understand cancer until you understand evolution.” I said evolution is an active, intentional process. (And I used the word intentional intentionally.) I said cells are intelligent, and as long as you underestimate the intelligence of cells in the evolutionary process, you’re never going to understand cancer.
The First Cancer Convo…
It was not until 2017 that the first conversations about cancer started to occur. The first I can recall was with Paul Davies. Paul is a fairly famous physicist. He’s done groundbreaking work and studied with some of the greatest physicists of all time. And he’s also been a peaceful voice in the science/religion dialog. Always one of the reasonable scientists.
Paul contacted me after I’d mailed him my book: “I loved your book, especially because of the cancer research that I’ve done. And I would like to have you come to the Beyond Center and speak at one of our coffeehouse events about your evolution prize.”
Which Harkened to a Connection at the National Cancer Institute…
Paul explained to me that Anna Barker, the former director of the National Cancer Institute, had reached out to him a few years before and said, “We would like you to do cancer research.” Paul replied, “I don’t know anything about cancer research.” Anna said, “That’s exactly why I want to hire you.”
That statement could be the motto of this journey.
Anna is a truly an “interdisciplinary” woman. She’s an immunologist interested in evolution and information theory who worked in government for many years. She understands how easily large government organizations get entrenched in ways of thinking, knows how that limits possibilities, and has always been one to fight for new ways of conceptualizing problems.
She chose Paul, as I understand it, because she had read some of his books. One is called How to Build a Time Machine. It’s a short, lay-person-friendly explanation of all of the rabbit trails that you go down when you ask the question:
“Would it be possible to go backwards in time?”
You don’t need a PhD in astrophysics to understand this book. So, Paul is also an interdisciplinary explainer. One who can cross multiple disciplines and explain them all in plain English.
That’s a sign of genius.
James Shapiro Sparks the Cancer & Evolution Symposium
Then, two years after that, I heard from James Shapiro. He said, “I’m working with Frank Laukien and Henry Heng. We want to do a cancer and evolution symposium in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Will you help us?”
Within six months, I was fully immersed in the cancer research world.
Along the way, I kept running into people who started
outside of biology, outside of evolution. But all had
come to the same conclusions as I had, independently of
me. Many came from practical, get it done backgrounds.
Investigative reporting, radiology, practicing oncology. Practicing medicine is like engineering. You care more about the outcome than you care about the theory.
These people were not just critics. They weren’t jealous peers. They didn’t have a religious ax to grind. No, they were trying to get stuff done.
How is evolutionary biologist James Shapiro an “outsider,” you might ask? He’s a bacterial geneticist at the University of Chicago, where he’s been working for 45 years. Everybody in genetics knows him. He’s a widely published, respected academic. Sounds like a total insider.
Yet also a rebel. He’s called BS on the conventional evolutionary biology community for his entire career. I once asked him, “Do your alternate views have anything to do with the fact that you studied English at Harvard, and then went to Cambridge for genetics, instead of getting a biology degree like most people in your field?”
He said, “Yes, that had everything to do with it. The biology people never had a chance to tell me what I was not allowed to think.” So he’s been an insider and an outsider his whole career.
Henry is a cancer researcher at Wayne State University. Henry figured out from his oncology research, observing the behavior of cancer cells, that there was no possible way standard evolutionary biology could be right. So Henry wrote a book called Genome Chaos. And somewhere in the process of writing that book, Henry discovered James Shapiro, who had come to almost identical conclusions. This story is very similar to that of Denis Noble at Oxford who, by knocking out genes to study the cardiac rhythm, also concluded that there was no possibility that the standard evolution story could be right. All of us figured out independently of one another that the whole field of evolutionary biology had been built on quicksand.
Symposium Achieves “Critical Mass” and Leads to Connection with American Association of Cancer Research
With Laukien, Heng, and Shapiro on board, we were able to draw an impressive lineup of blue chip institutional names. Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, MIT, Columbia, MD Anderson, the very best research centers in the world. Our symposium got enough of these people under one roof, that the critical mass happened. We garnered the level of credibility we needed.
The American Association of Cancer Research showed up and said, “We like what you’re doing. Let’s make you a Working Group.” (The organization has seven others.)
Other groups like this existed long before. For example, the International Society for Evolution, Ecology and Cancer, which started about ten years ago. There were others. But all this was “under the radar.” Suddenly all of these communities finally came together. Because of this, our AACR Cancer & Evolution membership now includes 1500 researchers. We are now in a position to even change the way cancer is defined in medical schools and textbooks.
We’re not there yet. But we’re in striking distance!
After the symposium, scientist Vincent Ling told me, “Perry, that was the best science conference I have attended in 30 years. At 95% of science conferences, you have one specialist get up and dive deep into one area. Then the next person does the same in their area of expertise. One after the other. But the presenters at your conference, rather than just staying in their cubicle and drilling deeper, deeper, deeper, were the kinds of people who stand up and look over their cubicle wall and ask, ‘How does what I’m doing connect with what she’s doing over there? Is the answer to my question in someone ELSE’s cubicle?’ Ninety-five percent of scientists never do that.”
On the third day of the symposium, I had everyone on a Zoom call and I asked, “Show of hands. How many of you are a little embarrassed to admit that you only understood about 30% of everything that you heard today?” Dozens of hands went up.
I said, “That’s good, because everybody is being stretched out of their comfort zones. We all had to learn to be interdisciplinary explainers. We need to keep standing up in our cubicles and talking to the other people willing to stand up in theirs.”
All This Leads to Funding Three Exciting Cancer-Curing Projects
Six months before the symposium, James Shapiro told me, Frank and Henry: “You have to read The First Cell by Azra Raza.”
I read it and reached out to Azra to ask if she would come on my podcast. And to my utter surprise, she emailed me back “Is this THE Perry Marshall?” I thought, “How on earth does an oncologist in New York City have any idea who I am?”
She says, “You wrote 80/20 Sales & Marketing and Evolution 2.0. And you have this audacious $10 million prize. Plus you wrote about my heroes, Barbara McClintock and Lynn Margulis.”
Azra had been fascinated with evolution since she was in middle school. And we both share a deep dissatisfaction with the status quo. For her it’s cancer treatment, for me evolution. We are both “calling-out-the-elephant-in-the-room” people.
Azra’s book calls BS on the cancer treatments of the last 50 years. My #1 question to her was, “How did you get away with writing this book? How did you not get body slammed for telling everybody that cancer research isn’t working?”
She said, “Because I’ve lived it. I’ve lost a husband to cancer. I’ve lost my daughter’s best friend to cancer. I’ve treated 60,000 patients. I have their tissue samples. I’ve been published in every major journal. NOBODY can call BS on me with a straight face because they all know it’s true.”
Azra, like Shapiro, is an insider-outsider. She’s not interested in protecting some pet theory or project. She’s only interested in helping patients live!
Results.
Azra is firmly convinced that “Giant Cells” are the mothers of cancer cells. Chemotherapy doesn’t kill them. You can eradicate the cancer and push it into remission, but those giant cells are still there.
But she believes if you take them out, you can prevent the recurrence of cancer. If you can identify them and take them out EARLY, you can prevent cancer from even happening in the first place.
They haven’t fully proven this yet, but all of the dots are connecting so far. The ability to stop cancer at Stage Negative One is an exhilarating, world-changing prospect. It is moving at breathtaking speed and we are helping fund her efforts.
My friend and long-time Evolution 2.0 volunteer, Paul Beauchemin, emailed me and said, “Perry you HAVE to interview Michael Levin on your podcast!” He sent me one of Michael’s videos.
I thought, “This guy is redefining biology!” I got in touch with him, we did the podcast, and he presented at the symposium. To put it bluntly, Michael is 10 years ahead of just about everybody. He holds a fundamentally different understanding of how biology works.
And guess what… another “outsider.” Michael came to biology by way of computer science.
He used to think that computer science was going to give us artificial intelligence. But soon came to the conclusion that there is no real AI in computer science. The real AI is what biology is doing. Michael would still say biology is a branch of computer science, but in saying that he is underscoring what computer scientists still do not know.
(Watch my latest podcast interview called The Engineering of Consciousness with Michael Levin and Donald Hoffman, at www.evo2.org/blog.)
Levin is part experimentalist, part entrepreneur, part engineer. So he approaches questions at a fundamentally different level than almost any standard trained scientist, always with an eye to “How can I get this accepted?”
Science Research. 2.0 has been supporting his lab. Michael is reversing cancer in amphibians and he is researching what that might mean for cancer in humans. Early indications show promise for reversing glioblastoma, which is one of the most vicious cancers in the world. Very exciting.
Summing up: So far we’re reversing cancer and detecting cancer at Stage Negative One.
Who else is doing that????
Finally, through Paul Davies I connected with geneticist Kimberly Busey who, with Planet Perry member and psychologist Eric Kuelker, is exploring the relationship between the stress hormone cortisol and cancer.
You know what I’m about to say, right? A clinical psychologist is an outsider in the cancer research field! Michael studied the connection between mental and physical trauma and cancer.
Psychology research has shown that certain traumatized people are three to four times more likely to get cancer. But people who have had adverse childhood events and have been through therapy suffer much lower rates.
Again, fascinating and promising, crucial, foundational work we are proud to help fund.
The Power of an Interdisciplinary Mastermind Group
As a business consultant, one of my favorite formats for education is called the mastermind group. At its best, you gather about 12 people in a room. You may have entrepreneurs in software, mortgage, furniture, trucking, you name it.
Such groups almost always cost more than $10,000 a year. I’ve been a member of such groups for 20 years and directed one for 17. It is extremely common in the entrepreneur space and it works. Getting out of your own business and fish bowl for even two days, to hear the ideas and advice of people OUTSIDE your industry is, I believe, essential to your success.
But, as far as I can tell, this is seldom done in most other industries. The cancer and evolution group is a science version of the mastermind concept. Though many members are oncologists or cancer researchers, members hail from many different branches of science cancer research. There is an appreciable number who do not come from any of the standard categories. Astrophysicists, chemists, information theorists.
This leads to interdisciplinary insights.
The evolution theme brings diverse fields into the conversation that wouldn’t otherwise belong. So I hope what appears to be the beginning of a mastermind concept will continue to get richer and richer as we go along.
We Need the Help of Another Outsider…YOU to Help Us Cure Cancer in Our Lifetime
I told you about three projects that any thinking person should recognize as highly productive, high Return On Investment areas of research. I believe that $1 invested in these projects will go 10 to 100 times farther than $1 given to conventional cancer research, which has made little progress on Stage 4 cancer in over 50 years.
The cancer industry is mired in a ditch. We are not! We have traction. We are moving ahead.
“Perry, why has it been so hard for these ‘obviously’ promising ideas to get funding?”
One reason is that we are selling prevention. Every good marketer knows that prevention is 16 times harder to sell than a cure. You have to sell a cure and work backwards to prevention.
Everyone understands this. If a man is having a heart attack right now, his arm is throbbing, and he’s writhing on the floor in agony, and you say, “If you give me $250,000, you’ll live.”
…He will say “Sold!” No marketing or persuasion skills required.
But if you rewind to five years earlier and approach the same guy, overweight, stuffing cheeseburgers down his gullet and swilling a 6-pack of Bud every day, and say, “Give me $25 a month and I’ll lower your risk of heart attack by 50%,” it’s a HARD SELL.
Not interested.
Thus I believe that, since it costs a lot of money for individuals, insurance companies, governments and communities to treat people in Stage Four, just so they can live six more miserable weeks, we ought to have the wherewithal to stop and say, These guys at Science Research 2.0 are actually doing something about this and we need to help them.
I don’t really care if it’s grants, or foundations, or government, or wealthy individuals, or not-so- wealthy individuals. Frankly, it’s going to come from all of these places.
But THIS is worthy of your time, attention and money. Half the people reading this will, in the next two months, hear about another close friend or mother or brother who just got a cancer diagnosis. If it’s Stage Four, they have no better shot than they did 50 years ago.
Let’s change that.
We need someone to come forward and donate $1 million. We need others to bring gifts of $10,000, $50,000 and $100,000. Even if you can only give $1,000 it makes a big difference.
We can make more progress in the next 10 years than has been made in the last 50 years by addressing the right problems instead of the wrong ones. But we need your help. Right now, all the money in conventional research is going into the late stage “cure.” This is backward. It’s too late by then.
We’re hacking at the very root, the start. We’ve redefined the problem. We’re making progress where no one has made it before. And I keep getting weekly confirmation that we’re on the right track. It’s exciting and it’s frustrating because I know we could do so much more so much faster, with more resources.
Let’s cure cancer in our lifetimes.
Donate at www.evo2.org/cancer
What Can You Do to Be a Part of Evolution 2.0?
Evolution 2.0 is me, CEO Jon Correll, Mary McEvoy and a few other precious volunteers to contribute hours here and there. We can really use your hands-on assistance.
Another thing you can do to help is fund our virus research. I know of no one who is bringing a full-fledged “Evolution 2.0” viewpoint on virus evolution. It’s 501c3 not for profit, so you can go to evo2.org and make a tax-deductible donation.
We could also use some volunteers. We need people who are skilled in…
If any of the above piques your interest, please reach out and let us know. Email [email protected] and let us know what your skills are and how you might like to help.
Carpe diem – Seize the day.
Perry Marshall
Donate Here: www.evo2.org/cancer
Podcast link: https://evo2.org/podcasts/from-evolution-to-cancer-the-oral-history-of-our-7-year-journey/
Two leading pioneers in the field of cognition discuss the sea change that is underway in consciousness and evolution:
Michael Levin is 10 years ahead of multiple fields in biology, producing extraordinary breakthroughs in limb regeneration, cancer, and bioengineering.
Donald Hoffman is a champion of a new model that says the cosmos is consciousness first and matter second, not the other way around. The intersection of their ideas promises a universe of new possibilities grounded in testable hypotheses and solid engineering.
Podcast link:
The Engineering of Consciousness with Michael Levin and Donald Hoffman
When you’re trying to solve a thorny, knotty, intractable, “IMPOSSIBLE” problem, the #1 thing to watch for is:
Outsiders from radically different backgrounds, who not only all agree that the mainstream is hopelessly jacked up, but who ALSO came to identical conclusions – WITHOUT having ever talked to each other in advance.
In Evolution 2.0 I witnessed this 3 times.
1. Shortly after my book came out, John Hands released Cosmosapiens. John and I had never spoken or met, but reached nearly identical conclusions.
2. Radiologist Bill Miller, independently of me and John Hands, had similar realizations. A virology paper we have written together is now in peer review.
3. And Henry Heng came to nearly identical “Evolution 2.0” conclusions in his cancer work, mostly using cancer as his learning tool.
A couple of years ago James Shapiro and Frank Laukien introduced me to Henry. Together we founded the Cancer & Evolution working group. Henry is 15-30 years ahead of the mainstream cancer field. Henry in turn introduced me to Rafe Furst, a serial entrepreneur.
This is the story of Henry’s work:
https://researchfeatures.com/genome-architecture-theory-shakes-cancer-research/
Rafe wrote this summary of Henry’s model, explaining how cancer cells use “Genome Chaos” to skillfully evade radiation and chemotherapy:
https://evo2.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Henry-Heng-Rafe-Furst-2021-Genome-Chaos.pdf
Watch my conversation with Rafe and Henry on the Evolution 2.0 Podcast:
Why is there evil and suffering?
Why is Old Testament Biblegod so mean and nasty?
Why doesn’t God stop the injustice?
Does God even have a right to create an evolutionary universe?
Hear Perry’s 18 minute talk at the 2021 annual meeting of the American Scientific Association (www.asa3.org), the largest organization of professional scientists who are practicing Christians.
Closely related: “Was Adam a real dude and does it really matter?”
Listen below:
https://open.acast.com/public/streams/5b4590cd802e4c0919bef6da/episodes/626faa0d9a4d1700125388d4.mp3
I sat down with John Maddox who has a keen interest in information, computing, biology and evolution. John cuts right to the chase and hammers on the central issues that make biology a non-materialistic science…along with stories of numerous conflicts we’ve had along the way.
Podcast link:
