Moffitt’s Sandy Anderson was the leading author behind a paper [Cell) published in Cell a couple of years ago. One of the main points of the article is that milder microenvironments lead to tumours in which many different phenotypes can coexist. Harsher microenvironments (in which it is more difficult to grow or those with less available resources) on the other hand lead to tumours in which only a few more dominant phenotypes can survive.
Sandy and colleagues in Vanderbilt have been working on the follow up of this project and, among other reasons, because they were all down in Tampa last week I guess I had that idea in mind when I got my copy of the St Peterburg Times this sunday. So it seems that the number of banks keeps decreasing as the economy continues to spiral down. A better economic environment allowed the existence of a myriad of banks small and big with different approaches to do business. As money gets tighter only a few (bigger and stronger ones) are expected to survive.
It is an interesting parallelism between tumour progression and the banking market although I am not sure what would be the correlate with the financial bail out….
Hey David, I’m procrastinating on grant writing (again), so, as usual, you’ve made me think a little and lose time when I could be better employed begging!
OK, I have seen the evolution of religion and that of tumors linked before – group selection, etc – I’m thinking of David Sloan Wilson and some of E.O. Wilson’s work here. And you know how living in the bible belt informs my opinions on that subject. However I hadn’t really considered that banks were a cancer on society – must be my capitalist upbringing – so this is an interesting idea.
I was thinking a little about the relative complexity of animal/plant populations in harsh versus mild environments. Classically we are taught that in the arctic there are arctic hares which are eaten by arctic foxes (I don’t think anyone ever told me what the hares eat). While we all recognize that this is a simplification the frozen tundra is certainly a more straightforward situation than a tropical rain forest or a coral reef. Likewise a desert is a harsh place and has a more simple set of relationships in its flora and fauna – so it’s not just a hot place vs cold place thing.
So getting, finally, to Sandy’s paper. I still think that it is a very interesting piece of work. I did read it several times, actually both ways across the Atlantic, in order to halfway understand it. There is some experimental support for the ideas, but I’d still very much like to see what is really happening in real tumors in patients. I think we can start to crack into this with more complex biological models. My feeling though – and this won’t surprise you – is that, in fact, tumors contain areas which are harsh and others which are not. I’m not sure that this plays into the model in quite the way that it should. Likewise there is a whole surrounding microenvironment which contains many cell types several of which are required for the tumor to survive.
On your final point, I guess the bailout is some sort of balm which preserves some of the phenotypes which would otherwise perish – perhaps preventing bankers from jumping out of the windows!
Hi Simon, I admit I considered explicitly comparing banks to tumours (as opposed to just suggesting it) but then I thought that I would not try to make a moral|political point on the financial crisis. In any case I’d just say that I begin to see the bailout in cancer terms as a pro angiogenesis treatment, would that make sense? but one in which one would really need to bleed the patient to feed the … well, the tumour.
As for Sandy’s paper, I think it is a great observation that heterogeneity is likely to play a big role: complexity in an ecosystem (tumour ecosystem or otherwise) is hardly a function of the mildness of the environment but also of the availability of niches for speciation. Such an environment is likely to lead to more robust tumour phenotypes/banks as there will be enough strategies all around so that one or more is likely to survive and thrive in times of crisis. But also will lead to very hard/agressive/robust phenotypes that had manage to survive in niches in which they have managed to outadapt the competition. So as opposed to a rather homogeneous environment, a more complex one with harsh and mild niches could have the best/worst of both worlds: a diversity of very hard players.