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but mortally susceptible to the common cold.

will skip the line you expected here and get right to the point: INVINCIBLE MICE ARMY?!?

Will this cure cancer in rats? Because, EVERYTHING causes cancer in rats!

I'll take a carton of cigarettes and a shot of mouse blood.

See PNAS, vol. 103, no 20, p7753-7758. VERY interesting work.

Hmm... now curing cancer is nice and all, but if/when applied to humans, does this mean they can smoke cigarettes w/o ill effect, clean up nuclear waste with their bare hands, or travel in space for extended duration w/o ill effect?

How good is this really?

(Assuming this is true, it is a wonderful step.)

So the mouse is a cylon?

I mean, a'doy. Dr Baltar already figured this out. It cured President Rosylin's cancer, after all.

The media is quick to call things like this a cure. The fact remains that, with some exceptions, men are not mice. Back in the late 90s, angiogenesis inhibitors (a class of drugs that inhibit the growth of new blood vessels, needed by tumors to provide nourishment as they grow) were being tested with amazing success in mice, preventing the spread of almost every form of cancer. It was hailed as the coming cure.

Some angiogenesis inhibitors have proven to be very helpful in treating cancer, but they are not a cure. They aren't nearly as effective in humans as they were in mice, it appears.

I'm always skeptical (and you should be too), when you hear about something that isn't even in clinical trials, as a possible cure for some disease people get. People simply don't respond the same as mice.

That said, this does look promising as an avenue, but I wouldn't go out and take up smoking just yet.

Okay, let's think about this for a second.

A cancerous cell is one that doesn't know when to quit. It is outside the normal cell cycle, and not listening to every cell's built in death trigger. Forvige my lack of specific biology terminalogy.

So these mice are "cancer-resistant"? When exposed to carcenigous, do they ignore them? When exposed to massive ammounts of UV light, do they tan but not burn? Do they burn but not get skin cancer? If you clogged thier lungs with cig smoke, would they develop a cough but not cancer?

How the frak does this work? Are the little mice cells just really tuned into thier death trigger? When a cell mutates enough that it doesn't listen to it's death trigger, it is a cancer. Are these mice just impervious to cell mutation?

If so, wouldn't that make them an evolutionary dead end? Cancer, while bad, is a by-product of evolution. If cells weren't allowed to ever mutate again, would that spell the end of mice evolution? And if we impart that "cancer-immunity" to we humans, would that spell the end of evolution?

By all means, someone correct what I have wrong. Biology was never my strong suit. (Nor is spelling)

"The cancer resistance trait so far has been passed to more than 2,000 descendants in 14 generations"

If you cure cancer, you get laid.

they are able to provide "lifetime cancer protection"

I see, so the protection lasts right until they die... from cancer. I think Aleve can do this just as well :)

Richard Gere is all smiles and breathing a sigh of relief.

Telomerase structure has been identified.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4698264.stm [bbc.co.uk]

"... able to provide "lifetime cancer protection"."

The article fails to mention that 'lifetime' can be greatly affected by the neighboring reptile obesity study.

As exciting as this sounds, it's probably not going to lead to a pancea for cancer in humans. We've cured cancer in mice several times over since the 70s. The problem is that mice are a short-lived species that has very little innate resistance to cancer. After all evolution is not going to have an organism waste lots of energy repairing DNA damage and having pools of immune cells constantly checking for mutant cells if the organism is just going to get eaten by a cat in an average of a few months after birth.
    By contrast, humans are a very long-lived animal species. Our bodies already have a large number of cancer-prevention mechanisms that simply aren't present in mice. Take for example telomeres. The telomere ends of chromosomes shorten with each cell replication other than gamete formation. All your cells have what is known as the 'Hayflick limit' where the telomeres get too short, the chromosomes become unstable and the cell dies. Although this mechanism is probably one of the contributors to human aging, it also does a very good job of eliminating many tumors. Most of your tumors hit the Hayflick limit and simply die off before they can present a threat to you. Virtually all human cancers either mutate so as to find a way to reactivate the telomerase that re-lengthens the telomeres or manages to find a way to preserve their telomere ends through chromosomal recombination. Mouse cells, by way of contrast, have huge telomeres which never get short enough to act as this sort of cancer-prevention mechanism.
    As a result human tumors are much 'tougher' than mouse tumors. The average mouse tumor wouldn't stand a chance in a human. Any tumor that manages to thrive in a human has had to jump a host of hurdles and checkpoints that no mouse tumor does in order to simply survive.
    The problem is that many of these cancer cures in mice already exist in humans naturally. Some of these cures (such as this one, most likely) are simply reactivation of vestigial anti-cancer systems in the mice that have atrophied for the above-mentioned reasons. Others are cancer treatments that attack weaknesses in mouse tumors that are simply irrelevant in human ones. I suspect that this super mouse is simply being more human with regards to cancer and that the end result is that we'll rediscover something our bodies already do.

...mice begin smoking filterless cigarettes with wild abandon.

MjM

Fantastic! I am very excited about this development. Will there be an ergonomic model released to prevent me from getting RSI, too? Perhaps a cancer-resistant trackball is in order.

... oh. Nevermind.