[extropy-chat] [Biomed] Contagious Cancer

[J. Andrew Rogers]

At 03:58 PM 8/15/2006 -0700, Stuart LaForge wrote:
> Very bizarre. Turns out there is a communicable form
> of cancer in dogs that is not transmitted by a virus
> or other etiological agent but by the cancer cells
> themselves. Freaky. They are isolating tumors from
> dogs that do not belong to those dogs but to a dog or
> wolf that lived in Siberia between 250 and 2500 years
> ago. The tumor cells have essentially evolved
> (devolved?) from being components of a multicellular
> organism into bona-fide single-celled parasites.
> Fortunately, for now at least, its only in dogs but
> then again evolution never stops.
>
> http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/060810_dog_cancer.html


A thought just occurred to me:  perhaps this could explain some  
currently inexplicable cancer clusters?

This reminds me of a small and somewhat remote town ("small" = ~500  
people) I lived in growing up, that had a number of instances of the  
same kind of fatal cancer over a couple year period.  A few  
government agencies took a keen interest but after exhaustive studies  
could find no plausible environmental factors (e.g. contaminants)  
that could explain how so many people in such  a small population  
could develop the same kind of cancer at roughly the same time.  And  
it disappeared as abruptly as it had come.  It would seem that the  
spontaneous formation of a contagious cancer could reasonably explain  
that pattern, though at the time people would have thought you were  
crazy to suggest such a thing was even possible.

J. Andrew Rogers