Tripping Over the Truth: The Return of the Metabolic Theory of Cancer Illuminates a New and Hopeful Path to a Cure by Travis Christofferson

Author:Travis Christofferson [Christofferson, Travis]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Published: 2015-06-11T04:30:00+00:00

Part 4

Dark Matter

“It has become axiomatic that the seeds of cancer lie in genes.”

—Michael Bishop

“The important thing is not to stop questioning.”

—Albert Einstein

The late nineties in the United States were defined by a meteoric euphoria over technology. It was an incandescent decade of unlimited possibility, economic expansion, and prosperity. Allen Greenspan aptly labeled it a period defined by “irrational exuberance.” The tech-heavy NASDAQ shot up nearly 700 percent from 1995 to 2000, and fortunes were made overnight.

The euphoria was sparked by the nascent power of the Internet. Everyone was calling it a “new economy.” Dot-com fever was pandemic. Investors convinced themselves that shell companies with no earnings, just wildly optimistic vision and a name with “.com” following it, were worth hundreds of millions in stock market valuation. The euphoria spilled over into biotechnology. Visionaries started biotech companies and attracted venture capital with nothing more than an elegantly pitched dream and a narrative of a future without disease or aging.

The cloning of “Dolly” the sheep in the mid-1990s pollinated the atmosphere. Called somatic cell nuclear transfer, the technology was Ponce de Leon’s fabled fountain of youth. It was a recapitulation of ourselves in a renewed version. A biological sleight of hand was performed by extracting DNA from an adult organism’s cell and transplanting it into an isolated oocyte, an egg cell, with its DNA removed. Instead of the mingling of genes that evolution used to pick and choose favorites, the embryo was a clone, an exact replica of its donor. The fertilized egg was then planted into a surrogate, where it gestated until birth. It came as a shock to most scientists that cloning was possible. The egg cell was capable of something almost magical. The egg contained unknown factors that conspired to rejuvenate the older sheep’s DNA, rearranging it back to ground zero, the moment when sperm met egg, resetting the clock in a display of biological time travel—again allowing the program of life to begin its magical journey, unfolding a dazzling symphony of molecular choreography, creating a life.

The fact that DNA was so malleable, so pliable, and capable of being rejuvenated was incredible, and it opened an inconceivable spectrum of possibility. Companies sprouted up to capitalize on the unlimited possibility of the technology. Advanced Cell Technology was one company. “We are close to transferring the immortal characteristics of germ cells to our bodies and essentially eliminating aging,” its founder, Michael West, told Wired. “That sounds spectacular, but I believe those are the facts.” West wasn’t alone in his belief. Calvin Harley, the head scientist at Geron, said, “We are all born young. There is a capacity to have an immortal propagation of cells the way we have evolved is to go from germ line to germ line, with our somas (bodies) the dead end carriers, but that is not inevitable.”

Perhaps more than any other decade, the nineties were defined by a collective belief that we were on the cusp of a transformative new era, even though many of the dreams propagated by the visionary companies failed to materialize.

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