What Exactly Is Cancer Anyway?

This is a unique show in the Finding Genius series. Podcast founder and host Richard Jacobs cites Perry Marshall’s ideas as the impetus for starting the Finding Genius podcast.

In this discussion, listeners can learn more about why and hear about the Cancer & Evolution Symposium Marshall has helped construct on cancer and evolutionary biology.

He explains:

What the basic ideas of his book Evolution 2.0 are, namely an argument for a new model for evolution that better fits organisms’ active adaptations

How cancer is evolution gone wild and why better cancer treatment necessitates adopting this new conception of evolution

Which topics and speakers appear in the Cancer and Evolution Symposium and a preview of several exciting findings they presented.

Perry Marshall is an author and highly influential business consultant with an electrical engineering background. In this discussion, he connects the foundational ideas in Evolution 2.0 with cutting-edge cancer science. Marshall lost his father to cancer at age 17 and has followed the theories behind its treatment ever since. He reminds listeners that common cancer therapy treatment only works routinely with early-stage cancer.

Alternatively, he says that when cancer reaches stages 3 and 4, survival chances are not that much better than they were in 1930. Therefore, there must be a lag in how we are addressing serious cancer diagnoses. This lag is connected with a traditional view of passive evolutionary theory rather than theories like that of Professor Henry Heng, who claims evolution is actively engineered by organisms themselves; in addition, they are able to pass those engineered traits to their offspring.

Henry Heng was one of the speakers at the Cancer and Evolution Symposium along with Columbia University Medical Center’s Azra Raza and evolutionary theorist James Shapiro from the University of Chicago. Dr. Heng connects this theory of evolution and cancer, noting that treatments like chemo destroy about 98% of the cancer cells while the few remaining develop massive wholesale restructuring of their DNA and are then more equipped to spread and survive. Importantly, this restructuring is active rather than a random accident of mutations.

Marshall explains these ideas in more detail and discusses other topics covered by the speakers. He describes the symposium as a world-class collection of cancer and evolutionary theorists coming together to address cancer evolution and disable the cancer treatment lag. The symposium took place October 14th through 16th, 2020.

To learn more, see the symposium website: cancerevolution.org.

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