OCTOBER is BREAST CANCER AWARENESS MONTH! BE AWARE

Breast cancer took a turn in thinking back in 2009. This paradigm shift came from Dr. Mina Bissell of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.¹  Her message first came out in a paper handed to a well established scientist with whom she worked who promptly put it into the wastebasket.

Her idea, that gene mutations are only part of the process of cancer while acknowledging that mutations alone are not enough. She says, “Cancer involves an interaction between rogue cells and surrounding tissue.” This thought is a dramatic shift from the cancer gene theory that is relatively basic and simple and up to now predominate in cancer research. Focus on genes rather than isolated cancer cells demands a dramatic mental turn around for researchers who had based their findings on gene mutation alone.

Now, 20 years after Dr. Bissell and a small number of others began to explore this approach, a new perspective on cancer is at long last taking shape as more researchers become open to the cell theory in conjunction with the gene theory.

Not to disparage any of Dr. Bissell’s work, I nonetheless am compelled to say, “What do you think is new here? Otto H. Warburg was onto this approach long ago and now you seek credit as though everything you are looking at is completely new and innovative.”²

In lecture, Nobel laureate Dr. Warburg stated,“Cancer, above all other diseases, has countless secondary causes. But, even for cancer, there is only one prime cause. Summarized in a few words, the prime cause of cancer is the replacement of the respiration of oxygen in normal body cells by a fermentation of sugar.” ³

Called the Warburg effect, in oncology it is the observation that most cancer cells produce energy by a high level of glycolysis with lactate acid secretion and mitochondrial respiration even in the presence of oxygen.

It would appear science has come back from the long detour it took toward gene mutation theory that has been the major focus of cancer cures for the past 40 years. One might look and surmise the path initiated by Dr. Warburg in the 1930s has returned to its track thanks to Dr. Mina Bissell and others like her.

At long last the future of an eradicated cancer is more promising than it ever has been.

¹ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/29/health/research/29cancer.html?pagewanted=all

² http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warburg_hypothesis

³ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Heinrich_Warburg

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LouAnn Savage is publisher and editor of The Weekly Healthline, an online health and lifestyle publication. Subscribe free at: http://www.HealthFitforLife.com. Look for her at http://www.Savage.TeamAsea.com, Follow her on twitter @louannsavage and join her on Facebook.com/louannsavage.

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