In this latest post at PhysOrg, it seems that Darwinism hasn’t helped, but instead hindered the fight against cancer.
Dr. Peter Duesberg, a molecular biologist at Berkeley,
proposed in 2000 that the assumption underlying most cancer research today is wrong. That assumption, that cancer results from a handful of genetic mutations that drive a cell into uncontrolled growth, has failed to explain many aspects of cancer, he said, and has led researchers down the wrong path.
And, in words that support Behe’s main thesis in “The Edge of Evolution”, Deusberg also adds:
“In this new study and in one published in 2005, we have proved that only chromosomal rearrangements, rather than mutations, can explain the high rates and wide ranges of drug resistance in cancer cells.”
Think of the number of people who die each year of cancer as compared to the number who die from bacterial infection, and one can easily see that all the chest-slapping by the Darwinists about how RM+NS has given us anti-bacterial drugs can know pound their breasts in remorse at the “wrong path” mutational theory has led cancer researchers. This isn’t just a battle between the God-denying and the God-affirming segments of our global society, it’s about good science versus bad science, about reason versus myth.
In a paper responding to Duesberg’s in the same issue of Drug Resistance Updates, Tito Fojo of the National Cancer Institute argues that there are many ways in which the mutation theory of cancer can explain drug resistance. A gene mutation, deletion, translocation or amplification could disrupt many cell functions, leading to resistance, or could inactivate or damage the doors through which a drug enters a cell.
Duesberg counters that aneuploidy is simpler and can explain the common development of resistance to many unrelated drugs within the same cancer. He has shown in experiments that aneuploidy causes many gene disruptions such as breakage or translocation each time a cancer cell divides, providing an opportunity for it to develop resistance to many drugs. Gene mutation rates in cancer cells, however, are no different from mutation rates in normal cells, making it difficult to understand how several simultaneous mutations can occur in cancer to make them resistant to more than one drug.
“The fundamental problem these conventional theories don’t address is why it (drug resistance) doesn’t happen in normal cells,” he said. “Why aren’t we all getting resistant to any toxic drug we are exposed to? Why does it happen only in cancer cells? Why do cancer cells become resistant and the patients don’t?”
Darwinism is like an addiction. You just can’t seem to be able to give the stuff up!