Breaking cancer's social network

摘要

As a physicist, why are you studying cancer? I study pattern formation in natural systems and have been promoting the idea of bacterial collective intelligence for three decades now. That began because, philosophically, I wanted to find the special difference between a nonliving particle and a single-celled organism. And what I found is that these organisms can sense the environment, measure it, process information and use stored data to make a decision. They behave as a community. I had been working on this for 20 years when I learned of alarming discoveries about cancer. It dawned on me that like bacteria, cancer behaves as a networked society of smart cells. To my delight, I realised we could make use of what I had encountered in social bacteria to better understand cancer.