When Ames realized to his horror that slapdash science by environmental groups and regulators was twisting priorities for environmental management in dangerous and unproductive ways, he owned up. He documented and presented an irrefutable case that human exposure to natural carcinogens—primarily in plants, but also in animals—swamps the total carcinogenic activity of industrial products. He took a lot of flack for this, but he stuck to his guns and told the truth. Here in the 21st century, we can see that Superfund and other regulatory programs have done their job. The Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and their analogs in other countries, and the investment made in environmental cleanup have greatly reduced the carcinogenic potential of exposure to industrial chemicals. If we as a society had half a brain, we would be pivoting our environmental management investments of time, money and expertise to more important sustainability impairments, including provision of potable water, ecosystem habitat quality, suppression of contagious diseases, food quality and quantity, antibiotic resistance, and others. Instead, we (to Ames’ and my frustration) continue to spend exorbitant resources managing meaningless quantities of industrial chemicals in the environment.
There is a sideways or hidden-ball importance to Ames’ work in the past 30 years. While demonstrating the abundance of natural carcinogens, it devolved that there is a corresponding abundance of natural anti-carcinogens. In an earlier post on this blog we discussed the anti-cancer screening program that yielded key chemotherapy drug Taxol from extracts of evergreen tree bark. Recently, the marine environment has provided substantial evidence of cancer-fighting chemicals.
Surveys show that cancer-fighting chemicals are associated with sponges, tunicates, corals, jellyfish, mollusks, bacteria, and blue-green “algae”. In fact, bacteria and cyanobacteria (blue-green algae, as we used to know them) are little factories pumping out carcinogenic and anti-cancer chemicals, often via complex and delicate ecological association with eukaryotes—sponges, tunicates, corals, etc. [2]. In many cases, it may be ecological system itself (that is, the physical and biochemical relationship of the microbes and their eukaryote associates) that is the source of the anti-cancer molecules.
Identifying, isolating, and testing chemical products of marine organisms is a technically difficult and expensive process [3]. In general, the organisms produce very small quantities of potentially useful molecules. To obtain sufficient quantities for screening and more intensive tests, it is usually necessary to find ways to synthesize the molecules originating in the marine environment. This is challenging enough. Of course in many cases naturally-produced molecules have toxic activity along with anti-cancer potential, similar to the drugs now used on chemotherapy cocktails. This complicates the development of effective and safe drugs from raw marine biochemicals. But the diversity and potential value of such chemicals makes the effort to develop them worthwhile (even if researchers tend to include a degree of obvious funding-agency cheerleading in their publications, see [2] and [3]).
Anyway. I’ve been having trouble balancing my own medications, even with the addition to my medical team of “palliative care” specialist Dr. S whose sole job is keeping me appropriately medicated. I’ve basically come to a twice-a-day process. I take meds once when I wake up in the morning, and then again around 7 or 8 in the evening. I’ve been trying to cut back on the morning meds, mostly because I take a lot of pills and it just seems like I ought to be able to survive on less. However. As I reduced the morning dosage of Benadryl and other meds designed to slow the massive production of thick, icky mucous in my throat, I became less functional during the day. I ended up parking my butt in the recliner in front of the television, with books and guitar within reach, and not moving until I took the larger evening dose of meds, when I was able to be more functional.
Now, while I’m quite able to survive reading a novel a day (which is about my rate when I’m butt-parking for 9 or 10 hours), noodling a little guitar, and watching “Pawn Stars”, “American Pickers”, and “NCIS” marathons, it’s not really much of a life. So, in the interests of becoming a more actively functional human being, I’m experimenting with increased dosage of morning meds. Today I took a moderate upgrade in the total a.m. mass of medications, and was able to spend some time clearing the finished half of the basement in preparation for Thanksgiving and running to the grocery store to get stuff to make rigatoni with bacon and mushroom cream with a salad of kohlrabi and other chunky vegetables in a soy-based Japanese style dressing for dinner tomorrow when Molly stops by to visit.
So I seem to be getting on top of this issue. Over all, I believe I continue to improve. What remains of my oral salivary glands came back online a few weeks ago, having been again suppressed by the radiation last spring. This means my mouth fills with thin, watery saliva at the same time that my throat continues to produce a thick, ropey mucous. But this actually means I’m recovering. The radiation damage continues to recede. I can’t feel any obvious signs of recurrent malignancy, but the December PET/CT will be the arbiter of that question. I’m also getting more comfortable with being without a tongue and thus unable to eat, drink, and talk for the rest of my life. This is a threshold that only a couple years ago I would have thought I’d never get past. But here I am, alive, mute, and obtaining my dietary ration by pouring goopy liquid rations into a tube stuck through my abdomen. Sometimes I amaze myself, and this bit of life process is one of those times.
Meanwhile, as always, I owe much of my strength to you, my friends and blog readers out there in the real world. Thank you so much for being here for me. This being autumn, I’m getting my writing chops together and working much more diligently on producing usable material. So if you have a little more time and interest, you will find a music review over at www.theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com , a reprint of my www.aehsfoundation.org weekly weblog at www.sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com , and the first chapter of our urban ecosystems book manuscript at www.docviper.livejournal.com . Regarding the latter, I know I’ve posted most of the manuscript in prior entries at that web portal. But I’m getting back into the rhythm of working on this book, and I’m going to post the existing material sequentially as preparation for posting new chapters starting in a few weeks. I expect to produce a chapter per week over the autumn and winter, which means we’ll have a draft ready to go to the publisher sometime in 2014. Yeeha!!! Thanks again, everybody. I love you all, more than you will ever know. I owe you my life, and that’s a debt I will never be able to repay. So bask in the knowledge that you are the primary reason I am alive and breathing vs. a box of ash and bone chips in the basement. Once more for posterity: Yeeha!!!
Notes
[1] http://reason.com/archives/1994/11/01/of-mice-and-men
[2] Simmons et al. 2005, Marine natural products as anticancer drugs. Mol. Cancer Ther. 2005:4:333-342, http://mct.aacrjournals.org/content/4/2/333
[3] Sima, P. and V. Vetvicka 2011. Bioactive substances with anti-neoplastic efficacy from marine invertebrates: Porifera and Coelenterata. World J. Clin. Oncol. 2011 November 10:2(11) 355-361.
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