'We misunderstand cancer by making it a noun'

From EDGE MASTER CLASS 2010: CANCERING - Listening In On The Body's Proteomic Conversation with W. Daniel Hillis:

"Instead of saying, 'My house has water', w' say, 'My plumbing is leaking.' Instead of saying, 'I have cance[r]'", we should say, "I am cancering.' The truth of the matter is we're probably cancering all the time, and our body is checking it in various ways, so we're not cancering out of control. Probably every house has a few leaky faucets, but it doesn't matter much because there are processes that are mitigating that by draining the leaks. Cancer is probably something like that.

"In order to understand what's actually going on, we have to look at the level of the things that are actually happening, and that level is proteomics. Now that we can actually measure that conversation between the parts, we're going to start building up a model that's a cause-and-effect model: This signal causes this to happen, that causes that to happen. Maybe we will not understand to the level of the molecular mechanism but we can have a kind of cause-and-effect picture of the process. More like we do in sociology or economics."

Last year's Edge Master Class in Los Angeles featured George Church and Craig Venter lecturing on Synthetic Genomics. Hillis points out that the genome is used to construct things, and that it's not the best place for analysis of what's going on. "Certainly," he says, "there are times it is useful, but I don't think that's where most of the information is.

If you think in terms of computer models, think of proteomics as a debugging tool for genomics programs. "When you write a computer program, the first thing you do is you try to run it, and it almost always has a bug in it, so you see what happens, and you debug it, you stop it in the middle of running, and you see what the state of the system is, and you understand what your bug is, and then you change the program. The proteome is the state".

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