Coffee Break: COVID-19 and Cancer, NIH Weaponized Against the People, Consciousness, AI and the Internet, and Famine

Part the First: How Do You Awaken Sleeping Cancer Cells.  Short answer: Inflammation.  Speaking from experience, anyone who have ever been treated successfully for cancer never fully relaxes after his or her tumor or condition is resolved.  Formerly metastatic cells can remain dormant for a long time.  Recent research has shown how they are reawakened.

From a short news article in Nature a two days ago:

Hidden in the lungs of some breast cancer survivors are tumour cells that can remain dormant for decades — until they one day trigger a relapse. Now, experiments in mice show that these rogue cells can be roused from their slumber by common respiratory illnesses such as COVID-19 or the flu.

The findings, published in Nature on 30 July, seem to extend to humans too: Data from thousands of people show that infection with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is linked with a nearly twofold increase in cancer-related death, possibly helping to explain why cancer death rates increased early during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The results are “really quite dramatic”, says James DeGregori, a cancer biologist at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Aurora, and an author of the study. “Respiratory virus infections didn’t just awaken the cells,” he says, they also caused them to proliferate, or multiply, “to enormous numbers”.

DeGregori and his colleagues wondered whether acute inflammation caused by a respiratory infection could also reactivate dormant cancer cells. To test this, the researchers genetically engineered mice to develop breast tumours similar to those in humans and to seed dormant tumour cells into other tissues including the lungs. Then, they infected the animals with either SARS-CoV-2 or influenza.

Within days of infection, dormant cancer cells in the lungs of the mice kicked into high gear, proliferated and formed metastatic lesions. But it wasn’t the pathogens directly that caused this to happen, the researchers learnt: it was a key immune molecule called interleukin-6 (IL-6), which helps to rev up the body’s response to foreign threats. They confirmed this by engineering mice to lack IL-6. In these animals, the dormant cancer cells did not multiply nearly as quickly.

The full paper is Respiratory viral infections awaken metastatic breast cancer cells in lungs (open access, very technical but the figures are clear).  The cancer literature is difficult at best, because cancer is such a shape-shifting disease with a thousand different causes.  But this paper is groundbreaking at first (and second) reading.  The data on IL-6 are very strong.  Population results are necessarily presented with statistics.  These are very good here, also.  Is the mouse the proper model?  Yes.  Cancer in the human and the mouse are very similar in their molecular and cellular pathology, as opposed to something like Alzheimer’s disease.  There is a lot left to do, but the human cancer/mortality data are also convincing:

In the full study population with follow-up till 31 December 2022, which included 4,837 participants with a cancer diagnosis before 1 January 2015 (indicating inferred remission), we observed 413 deaths (298 in the test negatives and 115 in the test positives), yielding an odds ratio of 4.50 (95% confidence interval: 3.49–5.81) (Fig. 5d). When we excluded 120 deaths directly attributed to COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2-positive cases still showed increased mortality with an odds ratio of 2.56 (95% CI: 1.86–3.51). Based on the 128 cancer-related deaths as an outcome, we estimated a nearly twofold increase in cancer mortality in those who tested positive compared with those who tested negative (odds ratio, 1.85; 95% CI: 1.14–3.02).

Breast cancer will not be the only dormant neoplasm awakened in COVID-19 patients.  And given the well-established connections between chronic inflammation and cancer, can anyone be surprised?  How many indications do we need that COVID-19 is more than a cold accompanied by anosmia and that healthy people are not harmed by SARS-CoV-2 infection?  As a reflection of his soft eugenics (has a eugenicist ever come from an but his social stratum?) the current Secretary of Health and Human Services would answer that the former cancer patient was not “healthy” before getting COVID-19.  He would, of course, be wrong.

Another important point.  This research was supported by at least fifteen (15) acknowledgments from funding agencies in the United States, including the National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute (NIH), Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Defense (which has funded cancer research for a long time), and the National Science Foundation.  Collaborators included several from the United Kingdom.  Since working with foreigners is now verboten, that is another good reason this research was started before January 20, 2025.

Part the Second: NIH is a “bureaucracy that we believe has been weaponized against the American people – Russell Vought.”  One day this week the federal government stopped all payments from grants in action.  Later that evening the decision was reversed.  Oops?  Okay then?  From STAT, Trump administration reverses course, lifts pause on NIH grant awards (paywall, sorry):

The White House Office of Management and Budget halted payments from the National Institutes of Health to researchers around the country, according to a memo sent to the institute and center directors at the agency on Tuesday afternoon. Then late in the evening, after protests from members of Congress and patient advocacy groups, the Trump administration reversed the move and reinstated the funding.

The afternoon email had directed NIH officials to immediately halt the issuing of research grants, research and development contracts, and training awards during a “pause” of unspecified duration.

That constituted the entirety of new and, possibly, ongoing research grant dollars that go from the NIH out to universities, academic medical centers, and other research institutions. The four-sentence email, which STAT obtained, referred to a footnote included with OMB’s apportionment of NIH funding, its allocation of congressionally appropriated dollars for the final two months of the fiscal year.

The Department of Health and Human Services, the email said, “has interpreted this footnote” to prohibit new awards and adds that NIH is “working to make this limitation short-term and temporary.” Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for HHS, confirmed Tuesday evening that OMB was “undertaking a review of NIH spending, some of which is now temporarily paused.”

News of the memo spread quickly, prompting an outcry. “They’re taking patients hostage, and we don’t even have a ransom note,” said Russ Paulsen, the CEO of the nonprofit UsAgainstAlzheimer’s.

The White House order (to release the funding) deepened a growing clash between OMB (Office of Management and Budget) Director Russell Vought and members of Congress from both parties. Last week, Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) authored a letter  (pdf) to Vought, urging him to release funds that Congress appropriated for the NIH.  It was signed by 14 Republican senators.  In an interview with CNN over the weekend, Vought pushed back by lambasting the NIH, calling it a “bureaucracy that we believe has been weaponized against the American people.”

Weaponized against the American people!  I trust that Mr. Vought and his entire extended family are safe from all misfortune, especially when it comes to their health.  There can be nothing else to say after that, because the never-practicing triple Stanford graduate Jay Bhattacharya MD is the overseer in charge of the NIH shop, and all is right with the world.  In any case, not to worry.  Knowledge is knowledge, and Chinese researchers are on every case – from quantum physics to cancer biology and everything in between.

Part the Third: Consciousness in All its Forms.  Mariana Lenharo has written a good article on the nature of conscious and how it might be detected.  The quest to detect consciousness — in all its possible forms is worth reading, if only for the illustration of the octopus looking at herself in the handheld mirror.  From a paper I remember reading twenty years ago (scientists who don’t read Science and Nature every week are only fooling themselves):

In late 2005, five months after a car accident, a 23-year-old woman lay unresponsive in a hospital bed. She had a severe brain injury and showed no sign of awareness. But when researchers scanning her brain asked her to imagine playing tennis, something striking happened: brain areas linked to movement lit up on her scan^.

The experiment, conceived by neuroscientist Adrian Owen and his colleagues, suggested that the woman understood the instructions and decided to cooperate — despite appearing to be unresponsive. Owen, now at Western University in London, Canada, and his colleagues had introduced a new way to test for consciousness. Whereas some previous tests relied on observing general brain activity, this strategy zeroed in on activity directly linked to a researcher’s verbal command.

The young woman clearly heard and responded.  Better tests for consciousness might not lead to interventions that revive consciousness but without them there will be no hope for those in what was previously called a “persistent vegetative state.”  Ugh.  This is not the same as the development of a complete molecular and cellular understanding of consciousness, which in my view is unlikely.  I place that in the same category as research on the “origin of life.”  There is no way to really know what happened that one time over hundreds of millions of years a few billion years ago.  Just-so stories should be left to Kipling.  The “causes” of consciousness will remain obscure within the trillions of connections of the seat of consciousness.  The “is” is more important than the “why” or “how.”

Regarding non-human consciousness, animals are conscious.  It is also clear that consciousness has several layers, but they are unlikely to reprise the ingenious-for-its-time but erroneous biogenetic law of Ernst Haeckel: Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny.  As with so many interesting biological problems, Stephen Jay Gould covered this well in his Ontogeny and Phylogeny.  Naturally, the question arises about machine consciousness.  No matter how many iterations of solutions to that problem are done, machines will never be conscious. At least probably not until I go the way of the Norwegian blue parrot and that is good enough, but I have concerns about our descendants.

Part the Fourth. Will the Internet Survive?  Yes, in some form but this interesting article from the BBC You might be ghosting the internet. Can it survive? takes on the question:

Over the last year, Google made a tweak. I’m sure you’ve noticed by now. The first thing you see in search results is often an AI-generated response, instead of the list of blue links that topped Google for decades. Google calls these chatbot answers “AI Overviews”. Sometimes they’re incredibly useful. Other times they literally tell people to eat rocks and glue in a moment of hallucination. Apparently, AI Overviews also influence what you do next.

This year, 900 web-surfing Americans gave the Pew Research Center permission to spy on their browsing. “These users were less likely to click a link when they did a search that produced an AI summary – and also more likely to end their browsing session entirely,” says Aaron Smith, director of Data Labs at Pew. According to a new analysis, Google searchers were almost two times less likely to click on links to other sites when they saw AI Overviews. And 26% of the time, they just closed their browser.

Well, I did notice but cannot remember actually clicking on the Google AI Overview.  It is well known that Google Search has been crappified beyond measure, which is why I don’t go there anymore.  Besides, I teach medical students, who are more than a little enamored with various and sundry AI tools that they fervently believe make “studying a breeze.”  The marketing departments of these “apps” are very good at their jobs.  I can be a hypocrite just as easily as anyone else, but that particular line is one not to be crossed.  I do not need Grok or one of his brothers in my life.  My iPhone suggesting the next word in a text message is quite enough.

This is the primary reason I use presearch.com for most of my searches these days.  Google might be underneath but it presearch.com seems less crappified.

Google denies their feature reduces clicks that advertisers:

Google, however, says that’s all nonsense. “We consistently direct billions of clicks to websites daily and have not observed significant drops in aggregate web traffic as is being suggested,” a spokesperson for the company says. “This study uses a flawed methodology and skewed query set that is not representative of Search traffic.”

Pew says it’s confident in its research. “Our findings are broadly consistent with independent studies conducted by web analytics firms,” Smith says. Dozens of reports show AI Overviews cut search traffic as much as 30% (pdf) to 70% depending on what people are Googling. Ray says she’s personally seen this in data from hundreds of websites.

It will surprise absolutely no one that Google needs to get its story straight:

Google’s own AI disagrees with its PR department. If you ask Google Gemini, it says AI Overviews hurt websites. And according to Ray, the evidence is clear. “Google is trying to spin information and hide the truth because people will freak out,” she says. The company says it’s committed to transparency.

We can leave the energy and social costs of AI to yesterday’s link.  Whatever happens, this will not end well.

Part the Fifth: Stop the World, I Want to Get Off.  Science is not the place one might have expected an article entitled Is Gaza’s hunger crisis officially a famine? Israel makes it hard to tell (Please note: I am not one for trigger warnings but the photograph accompanying this article is a powerful trigger.).  This needed to be published somewhere beyond explicit politics and Science fits.  I do wonder if the readers of Science, ensconced in their Professional Managerial Class (PMC) cocoons, will feel the need to rouse themselves.  Among my colleagues what I usually get is feigned ignorance.  But the other day one of them asked me “What is Neoliberalism?” because he had never heard the term.  So, what can you expect:

For weeks, U.N. agencies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have issued alarming statistics about horrific food shortages and malnutrition in Gaza. News media have shown heart-wrenching photos of crying children clamoring for something to eat, and others emaciated and at the brink of death.

Yesterday, the international authority on food insecurity spoke out about the crisis in dramatic words as well. In an alert, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification partnership (IPC) said, “The worst-case scenario of Famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip.” It called for an immediate ceasefire and “unimpeded, large-scale, life-saving humanitarian response.”

Yet the group stopped short, for now, of officially calling the situation a famine, the worst of five stages of food insecurity in its classification system. It could do so after a full-blown assessment expected to begin in a week or two.

A week or two…President Trump has admitted to the starvation conditions, without acknowledging that much of the responsibility that lies with the United States.  The New York Times has infamously “Timesplained” the issue.  Caitlin Johnstone followed up.  Technical definitions, they have their place, as everyone knows.  But the technical definition of famine was passed some time ago, just as we long ago passed the formal Gaza death toll of 59,821.  It has been said that famine has never occurred in a society with a free press.  And no, not that Free Press.  Unfortunately, Amartya Sen’s proposition remains true.

Part the Sixth: Wisdom to live by…

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

–Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) of Andalusia Farm

Thank you for reading.  I just passed my third anniversary at NC, and it has been an honor to contribute to the discussion.  The conundrum of so-called “mirror life” has been mentioned in previous comments.  This is an interesting question that calls for discussion.  Or an attempt at an answer, coming as soon as possible, without too much technical stereochemistry.