How can you think like a tumor cell? How can you untangle the chemical dance of cancer? Those are my thoughts while studying for my Cancer (BIOL 472) mid-term at Hunter College.
Scientists are at a disadvantage when trying to eavesdrop on the transformations of a normal cell changing into a tumor cell. We humans are overwhelmingly reliant on vision for input and linear events for analysis.
That kind of thinking sets you up for solving Newtonian mechanics, i.e. controlling the trajectory of an Apollo mission to space or at least the distance that a kicked football will travel but in the symphony that is cell chemistry, we really need a brain suited for wholistic, simultaneous events, based not on the visual image of something but more on the smell of something.
Non-visual humans are out there, subverting paradigms in their fields. I know we read about a blind biologist that achieved breakthroughs in shell analysis because he would feel the bivalves instead of just looking at them. That gave him a headstart on figuring out some of the aspects of their symmetry. For chemistry we need not a feeler but a smeller. Oh to be a dog. Man’s best friend, if he could evolve a better cerebral cortex. The insights of a dog-scientist into the biochemical signaling pathways of a neoplastic cell would be deep.
But since we aren’t dogs, the complex chatter of cell signaling has to be teased apart and interpreted by what are less straight science and something bordering on graphic design and the visual representation of data seen in the work of artists like Edward Tufte. Check out the artfulness of the data in some papers we studied this semester:
Hey, nice-looking new blog design!
Posted by: Dave | October 15, 2008 at 02:36 PM