I'll leave the SVO jokes to you guys
I think Wired has a paywall sometimes - here's a copy/paste
pt1
I think Wired has a paywall sometimes - here's a copy/paste
pt1
MEET THE CAROUSING, HARMONICA-PLAYING TEXAN WHO JUST WON A NOBEL FOR HIS CANCER BREAKTHROUGH
JAMES ALLISON LOOKS like a cross between Jerry Garcia and Ben Franklin, and he’s a bit of both, an iconoclastic scientist and musician known for good times and great achievements. He also doesn’t always answer his phone, especially when the call arrives at 5 am, from an unfamiliar number.
So when the Nobel Prize committee tried to reach Allison a few weeks ago to inform him he’d been awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in medicine, Allison ignored the call. Finally, at 5:30 am, Allison’s son dialed in on a familiar number to deliver the news. The calls have not stopped since.
Allison’s breakthrough was the discovery of a sort of secret handshake that cancer uses to evade the immune system, and a means to block that handshake—what the Nobel committee hailed as “a landmark in our fight against cancer,” which has “revolutionized cancer treatment, fundamentally changing the way we view how cancer can be managed.” (Allison’s co-recipient was Tasuko Honjo of Kyoto University.) Advances in cancer typically come in 50-year increments; the science that Allison and Honjo helped advance, cancer immunotherapy, has made a generational leap seemingly overnight.
Until very recently we’ve had three main methods for treating cancer. We’ve had surgery for at least 3,000 years. We added radiation therapy in 1896. Then in 1946, chemical warfare research led to the use of a mustard gas derivative to kill cancer cells. Those poisons were the foundation for chemotherapy.
These “cut, burn, and poison” techniques are currently estimated to be able to cure cancer in about half of the people who develop the disease. And that’s remarkable, a true medical accomplishment. But that leaves the other half of cancer patients. Last year, in the United States alone, that translated to nearly 600,000 people who died of the disease.
The fight was never fair. We’ve been pitting simple drugs against creative, mutating versions of our own cells, trying to kill the bad ones while sparing the good ones, and making ourselves sick in the process. And we’ve been doing that for a very long time.
But now we have added a new and very different approach—one that doesn’t act directly on cancer, but rather acts on the immune system. And that’s the breakthrough.
THE IMMUNE SYSTEM has evolved over 500 million years into a personalized and highly effective natural defense against disease. It is a complex biology with a seemingly simple mission: to find and destroy anything that’s not supposed to be in our bodies.
Hundreds of millions of immune cells circulate throughout the body, searching out and destroying invaders that make us sick and body cells that have become infected, have mutated, or have become defective—cells like cancer.
Which raises the question: Why doesn’t the immune system fight cancer already, the way it fights even the common cold?
For more than 100 years, medical researchers puzzled over that question. Most concluded that the immune system and cancer simply had nothing to say to each other. The argument was that since cancer is a normal body cell gone rogue, it is too much a part of us to ever trigger an immune response. Cancer immunotherapy was condemned as a quaint if simplistic idea based on high hopes and bad science. But despite the mounting mockery of the larger scientific community and dwindling research funds, a handful of immunotherapy researchers continued to believe—and continued searching, decade after decade, for the missing piece of the cancer immunity puzzle, a factor that prevented the immune system from recognizing and attacking cancer cells.
The stakes could not have been higher. If such a missing piece could be found, it would radically reshape our scientific understanding of both ourselves and disease and possibly revolutionize medicine on a scale not seen since the invention of vaccines. It might allow us to finally unleash our immune system, enabling it to recognize and attack cancer the way it does other diseases. It might even pave a new road to the cure. For the tens of millions more diagnosed with cancer each year, the race to find the missing piece of the cancer-immunity puzzle was literally a matter of life and death.
But despite the occasional glimmer in the darkness, generations of researchers had tried and failed to find this missing factor. Nobody could even say for certain that such a such a piece existed. And certainly nobody would have guessed that it would be discovered by a hard-living, harmonica-playing Texan who hadn’t even been looking for it.
THE STRETCH BETWEEN 1965 and 1973 were peak years if you were young and musical in Austin, when the little university town was just beginning its metamorphosis into the tech and freak capital of a cowboy state—Texas enough to two-step, hippie enough to do it stoned, and smart enough to work the newly relocated tech mills of Texas Instruments, Motorola, and IBM. Jim Allison fit right in.
He had outgrown his hometown of Alice, Texas, when the local high school failed to offer an advanced biology class that dared mention Charles Darwin. He turned to correspondence courses from the University of Texas at Austin. and after graduation he enrolled full-time, a 17-year-old bound to be a country doctor like his dad. Back then, the 2018 Nobel Prize in medicine wasn’t even a twinkle in the young Texan’s eye.
If you sold beer in Austin and had a surface flat enough to put a bar stool on, you were a music club, and Jim Allison played the blues harp well enough that he was in demand. He could sit in at the honky-tonks in town or play for Lone Stars in Luckenback, where the new breed of outlaw country players like Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings roamed the earth. Either way it was a lot of fun; premed, meanwhile, wasn’t proving to be that interesting. Allison wasn’t drawn to memorizing what others had found out. He wanted to arm himself with skills to do the finding himself, so in 1965 he switched tracks and traded memorization for a laboratory, working with enzymes toward a biochemistry PhD.
Enzymes are natural organic chemicals that make stuff happen. The enzymes Allison was studying happened to break down a chemical that fueled a type of mouse leukemia; inject a mouse with this specific enzyme and the enzyme destroyed the cancer fuel. His goal was to figure out the biochemistry of how those enzymes did their job.
In the experiment, once the enzyme eventually robbed the tumor of all its fuel, the tumor went necrotic and “disappeared.” Allison wanted to know where it went. Allison says. His curiosity led him to his first glimpse of a biology he would eventually redefine, and the first tenuous steps toward a generational breakthrough in the war against cancer.
Allison knew the disease intimately. He’d been just a kid when he lost his mom to it, had held her hand as she went, not even knowing what the disease was or why she had burns, only knowing she was gone. He’d lose most of his family that way eventually, and though he’d never say it out loud, and wouldn’t even much voice it to himself, in the back of his mind killing cancer would always be the one potential, practical outcome of his otherwise pure scientific research. Allison would follow his curiosity like a north star, wandering for decades, but heading home all the while.
The dead tumors in his mouse cages hadn’t just disappeared by magic, of course—it was biology. The human body sheds old, dead cells (a mass roughly equal to our body weight each year) the way trees shed leaves, and for essentially the same reason. The process (called “apoptosis,” from the Greek for “to fall away”) allows fresh daughter cells to take their place. The spring cleaning is carried out by hungry, blobby Pac-Man cells in our blood—part of a 500 million-year-old personal defense force that Allison’s textbooks called the innate immune system.
Today, aspects of our immune system still remain a mystery, but when Allison began his studies it hadn’t really even been explored, a sort of deep-ocean ecosystem in the human body. “New” aspects of the immune system, like the hunter-killer T-cells, were barely on the radar yet (Allison’ s college professor thought they were “too weird” evolutionarily to really exist). But some of the older aspects of the defenses in our bloodstream had been worked out, especially those of the innate immune system, which works much the same in sea sponges as it does in humans.
The ancient players of the innate immune system are charismatic and deceptively straightforward. They also happen to be big enough to be seen wiggling and eating under the microscope. That includes amoeba-like cells adept at squeezing between body cells and patrolling our perimeter (inside and out, we have a surface larger than a doubles tennis court), looking for what shouldn’t be there and killing it.
Some of the innate immune cells are small, blobby smart patrollers called dendrites. Others are similar-looking but larger blobby characters called macrophages (literally, “big eaters”). Most of what they eat are those retired body cells—normal cells that have hit their expiration date and politely self-destructed, through apoptosis. They also eat bad guys.
JAMES ALLISON LOOKS like a cross between Jerry Garcia and Ben Franklin, and he’s a bit of both, an iconoclastic scientist and musician known for good times and great achievements. He also doesn’t always answer his phone, especially when the call arrives at 5 am, from an unfamiliar number.
So when the Nobel Prize committee tried to reach Allison a few weeks ago to inform him he’d been awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in medicine, Allison ignored the call. Finally, at 5:30 am, Allison’s son dialed in on a familiar number to deliver the news. The calls have not stopped since.
Allison’s breakthrough was the discovery of a sort of secret handshake that cancer uses to evade the immune system, and a means to block that handshake—what the Nobel committee hailed as “a landmark in our fight against cancer,” which has “revolutionized cancer treatment, fundamentally changing the way we view how cancer can be managed.” (Allison’s co-recipient was Tasuko Honjo of Kyoto University.) Advances in cancer typically come in 50-year increments; the science that Allison and Honjo helped advance, cancer immunotherapy, has made a generational leap seemingly overnight.
Until very recently we’ve had three main methods for treating cancer. We’ve had surgery for at least 3,000 years. We added radiation therapy in 1896. Then in 1946, chemical warfare research led to the use of a mustard gas derivative to kill cancer cells. Those poisons were the foundation for chemotherapy.
These “cut, burn, and poison” techniques are currently estimated to be able to cure cancer in about half of the people who develop the disease. And that’s remarkable, a true medical accomplishment. But that leaves the other half of cancer patients. Last year, in the United States alone, that translated to nearly 600,000 people who died of the disease.
The fight was never fair. We’ve been pitting simple drugs against creative, mutating versions of our own cells, trying to kill the bad ones while sparing the good ones, and making ourselves sick in the process. And we’ve been doing that for a very long time.
But now we have added a new and very different approach—one that doesn’t act directly on cancer, but rather acts on the immune system. And that’s the breakthrough.
THE IMMUNE SYSTEM has evolved over 500 million years into a personalized and highly effective natural defense against disease. It is a complex biology with a seemingly simple mission: to find and destroy anything that’s not supposed to be in our bodies.
Hundreds of millions of immune cells circulate throughout the body, searching out and destroying invaders that make us sick and body cells that have become infected, have mutated, or have become defective—cells like cancer.
Which raises the question: Why doesn’t the immune system fight cancer already, the way it fights even the common cold?
For more than 100 years, medical researchers puzzled over that question. Most concluded that the immune system and cancer simply had nothing to say to each other. The argument was that since cancer is a normal body cell gone rogue, it is too much a part of us to ever trigger an immune response. Cancer immunotherapy was condemned as a quaint if simplistic idea based on high hopes and bad science. But despite the mounting mockery of the larger scientific community and dwindling research funds, a handful of immunotherapy researchers continued to believe—and continued searching, decade after decade, for the missing piece of the cancer immunity puzzle, a factor that prevented the immune system from recognizing and attacking cancer cells.
The stakes could not have been higher. If such a missing piece could be found, it would radically reshape our scientific understanding of both ourselves and disease and possibly revolutionize medicine on a scale not seen since the invention of vaccines. It might allow us to finally unleash our immune system, enabling it to recognize and attack cancer the way it does other diseases. It might even pave a new road to the cure. For the tens of millions more diagnosed with cancer each year, the race to find the missing piece of the cancer-immunity puzzle was literally a matter of life and death.
But despite the occasional glimmer in the darkness, generations of researchers had tried and failed to find this missing factor. Nobody could even say for certain that such a such a piece existed. And certainly nobody would have guessed that it would be discovered by a hard-living, harmonica-playing Texan who hadn’t even been looking for it.
THE STRETCH BETWEEN 1965 and 1973 were peak years if you were young and musical in Austin, when the little university town was just beginning its metamorphosis into the tech and freak capital of a cowboy state—Texas enough to two-step, hippie enough to do it stoned, and smart enough to work the newly relocated tech mills of Texas Instruments, Motorola, and IBM. Jim Allison fit right in.
He had outgrown his hometown of Alice, Texas, when the local high school failed to offer an advanced biology class that dared mention Charles Darwin. He turned to correspondence courses from the University of Texas at Austin. and after graduation he enrolled full-time, a 17-year-old bound to be a country doctor like his dad. Back then, the 2018 Nobel Prize in medicine wasn’t even a twinkle in the young Texan’s eye.
If you sold beer in Austin and had a surface flat enough to put a bar stool on, you were a music club, and Jim Allison played the blues harp well enough that he was in demand. He could sit in at the honky-tonks in town or play for Lone Stars in Luckenback, where the new breed of outlaw country players like Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings roamed the earth. Either way it was a lot of fun; premed, meanwhile, wasn’t proving to be that interesting. Allison wasn’t drawn to memorizing what others had found out. He wanted to arm himself with skills to do the finding himself, so in 1965 he switched tracks and traded memorization for a laboratory, working with enzymes toward a biochemistry PhD.
Enzymes are natural organic chemicals that make stuff happen. The enzymes Allison was studying happened to break down a chemical that fueled a type of mouse leukemia; inject a mouse with this specific enzyme and the enzyme destroyed the cancer fuel. His goal was to figure out the biochemistry of how those enzymes did their job.
In the experiment, once the enzyme eventually robbed the tumor of all its fuel, the tumor went necrotic and “disappeared.” Allison wanted to know where it went. Allison says. His curiosity led him to his first glimpse of a biology he would eventually redefine, and the first tenuous steps toward a generational breakthrough in the war against cancer.
Allison knew the disease intimately. He’d been just a kid when he lost his mom to it, had held her hand as she went, not even knowing what the disease was or why she had burns, only knowing she was gone. He’d lose most of his family that way eventually, and though he’d never say it out loud, and wouldn’t even much voice it to himself, in the back of his mind killing cancer would always be the one potential, practical outcome of his otherwise pure scientific research. Allison would follow his curiosity like a north star, wandering for decades, but heading home all the while.
The dead tumors in his mouse cages hadn’t just disappeared by magic, of course—it was biology. The human body sheds old, dead cells (a mass roughly equal to our body weight each year) the way trees shed leaves, and for essentially the same reason. The process (called “apoptosis,” from the Greek for “to fall away”) allows fresh daughter cells to take their place. The spring cleaning is carried out by hungry, blobby Pac-Man cells in our blood—part of a 500 million-year-old personal defense force that Allison’s textbooks called the innate immune system.
Today, aspects of our immune system still remain a mystery, but when Allison began his studies it hadn’t really even been explored, a sort of deep-ocean ecosystem in the human body. “New” aspects of the immune system, like the hunter-killer T-cells, were barely on the radar yet (Allison’ s college professor thought they were “too weird” evolutionarily to really exist). But some of the older aspects of the defenses in our bloodstream had been worked out, especially those of the innate immune system, which works much the same in sea sponges as it does in humans.
The ancient players of the innate immune system are charismatic and deceptively straightforward. They also happen to be big enough to be seen wiggling and eating under the microscope. That includes amoeba-like cells adept at squeezing between body cells and patrolling our perimeter (inside and out, we have a surface larger than a doubles tennis court), looking for what shouldn’t be there and killing it.
Some of the innate immune cells are small, blobby smart patrollers called dendrites. Others are similar-looking but larger blobby characters called macrophages (literally, “big eaters”). Most of what they eat are those retired body cells—normal cells that have hit their expiration date and politely self-destructed, through apoptosis. They also eat bad guys.
Comment