Engineering and Medicine

[Justfor_]

Transcript from a Michael Liebman presentation during a Cancer Patient Lab meeting (28:00):

youtube.com/watch?v=iHB9aOb...(Not working as expected?)

"...But we don't know any of those parameters, they're not measured under the same condition. So what we did here is consider that a biological pathway is very much like a communication network, a series of towers that you have moving signals around. Biology is just moving a signal around to accommodate blockages in vision, mutations, and so on. We went to the engineers and borrowed their communication engineer tools to allow us to simulate that behavior, because it's exactly the same problem, just implemented in a different way..."

I have been doing something like this for 2 years now, i.e. apply the fundamental principles of a micro-grid power network to my PCa treatment. And yes, "it's exactly the same problem, just implemented in a different way." .

[JohnInTheMiddle]

The communications towers reference in the context of prostate cancer doesn't come up until about 27 minutes in. The whole thing is a slightly boring perspective of the world in which the prostate cancer person lives. And then at one point later someone refers to the "conveyor belt of death". So we rush along to palliative care but there isn't a lot of promotion of exercise is my comment on this in practical terms.

[CaptnMojoe]

Jf_ Good presentation. One that all MOs could benefit from watching.

As for you and your analogical engineering mind at work in seeking to unlock some of the mysteries of PCa, you sound very much like a practitioner of "Synectics". It is a problem-solving tool I learned as a first-year design student back in the mid-60s. This is the book we used for the semester's design studio (*):

Synectics: The development of creative capacity, Paperback – January 1, 1969, by William J.J. Gordon.

amazon.com/Synectics-develo...

(*) If interested a PDF copy of the book can be downloaded here:

dokumen.pub/synectics-the-d...

For me, the most significant ideas were about "making the strange familiar" and "making the familiar strange". The analogical tools for doing that were: 1) Personal Analogy, 2) Direct Analogy, 3) Symbolic Analogy, & 4) Fantasy Analogy.

I remember a two-part short studio problem where we were to use Synectics to first formulate a design for an ideal house for habitation by creatures with the physical characteristics of humans and the social structure of ants. The second part reversed the criteria to the physical characteristics of ants and the social structure of humans. Great fun and a very expansionary thought experiments for a 1st-year student just starting to explore the creative process.

Here is the Wiki page for Synectics:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synec...

Trust the long COVID is now fully in your medical rear-view mirror. Hope so - and that all is well in your neighborhood.

Saluti - Captn Mojoe

[Justfor_ in reply to CaptnMojoe]

Captain, my captain,Hate to sound like the fatherly figure of Mr Portokalos from the movie: "My fat Greek wedding", but Synectics is probably derived from (adj.) synectikos (Google translate : coherent) that originates from the composite verb συν=plus + έχω=have, i.e. to keep things densely together without lose-ends.

[CaptnMojoe in reply to Justfor_]

Justfor_

Well, Young Man, You are 100% correct on the Greek language derivative. The first sentence in the Introduction of Gordon's book on Synectics reads as follows:

"The word Synectics, from the Greek, means the joining together of different and apparently irrelevant elements."

The section below from a bit later reminds me of the dynamics on display at Cancer Hacker Lab. A premier example of the whole being much greater that the sum of its individual parts:

"The present Cambridge Synectics group consists of six men of varied background (physics, mechanics, biology, geology, marketing, and chemistry). Part of their time is spent in sessions attacking invention problems. Tape recordings of successful sessions (where a concept promising enough to test is developed) are analyzed to learn how the concept originated. Another part of their time is devoted to implementation—building working models, conducting experiments, and investigating market potentials. There are frequent discussions of progress which serve two purposes. First, they keep the group in touch with how a project is going. Second, by hearing about how individuals overcome specific problems, more is learned about the invention process. The other activity of the group is teaching. Certain members select candidates and train selectees from client companies in the use of the Synectics method."

In our case we are trying to "invent" a curative and/or durable treatment for PCa - while most often serving as n=1 test mules for our treatment "inventions".

Stay Well, Brother

[dmt1121]

Fascinating and exactly what I have been thinking about how PCa "outsmarts" the treatments. Thank you for sharing this with us!

[NPfisherman]

Justfor,

Thanks for posting... As research has expanded into targets other than AR, we get closer to a drug regimen that can control PCa, and get us closer to a status of chronic disease similar to what happened to HIV. Research into TLRs (toll like receptors) that can allow immunotherapies to penetrate tumors, bromodomain inhibitors, and other targeted therapy (Precision medicine) will get us there...

The Science is Coming !!! .... just not as fast as it possibly could...

Don Pescado