Cancer Killing Ideas From Honeybees
Posted on February 7, 2008 Comments (1)
Honeybee Weapon in War on Cancer
No, researchers haven’t found a beehive-based cure (though major royal jelly, the wondrous protein concoction that turns lowly workers into queens, may have anti-cancer properties.) But bee colonies experience their own type of cancer, and maybe human researchers can learn from their victories.
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Like Amdam said, it’s not clear how the honeybees won. Perhaps the successful colonies produced bees adapted to noticing the intruder; perhaps it produced individual bees whose interactions caused some sort of superorganism-wide shift. And maybe when we figure that out, we’ll have some fresh ideas for fighting cancer — maybe not for tweaking our own cells, but for customized nanomolecule cancer hunters.
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Like Amdam said, it’s not clear how the honeybees won. Perhaps the successful colonies produced bees adapted to noticing the intruder; perhaps it produced individual bees whose interactions caused some sort of superorganism-wide shift. And maybe when we figure that out, we’ll have some fresh ideas for fighting cancer — maybe not for tweaking our own cells, but for customized nanomolecule cancer hunters.
Related: Leading Causes of Death – Cancer Deaths, Not a Declining Trend – Virus Found to be One Likely Factor in Bee Colony Collapse Disorder
One Response to “Cancer Killing Ideas From Honeybees”
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August 19th, 2008 @ 8:06 am
“So far, the molecule favored by the researchers has a nearly 100-fold difference in toxicity to cancer cells vs. healthy cells, meaning it takes 100 times more of the compound to kill a healthy cell than it does to kill a cancer cell…”