You Don't Know What Cancer Is 

The metaphor of cancer as the "selfish ant" works really well, and I feel is a good way to explain it to others.

I have Hodgkin Lymphoma (second chemo session Tuesday) and this video helped me so much, especially why if I relapse later, it will be worse and can't just do more ABVD, it's because those individual cells that survived all 6 cycles are the strong bois and then they got the chance to reproduce and they need to be hit harder. Thank you Hank for this and everything else you've made! I feel much more informed about my treatment and cancer every time 💞

This was really informative for me. Personally, when you mentioned how your son has your genetics, but not your cells, that helped me to make the conceptual shift about natural selection. Also, saying, “You are extincting a species of single celled organisms that shares your DNA but is acting on its own behalf” helped with my full understanding of cancer. Thank you so much for sharing 💚

Cancer is like if one ant decided to be like, "Well, what if I was queen?" and started to disrupt the colony. I think that having consumed content from you and John for the majority of my life has fundamentally made it easier for me to comprehend this stuff, but I think that it's really helpful. I like the eusocial insect analogy because it allows you scale up and down more easily. Thanks Hank! Always fun to see how you think.

Underneath this explaining (which is excellent, as always), I hear Hank wrestling with deeper feelings and deeper questioning. That’s what I sense, at least. Which makes total sense. Processing within while explaining outwards. We love you, Hank.

Your videos about cancer are comforting.. My mother has cervical cancer that has spread, some actually rotted in her body. I made her a painting before she goes to the hospital tommorow, with a message on the back. I hope she likes it.

It was wonderful to hear you talk it through, and you had a great ant-colony analogy! My cancer (a 5" diameter stage 2C ovarian granulosa cell cancer) was "avid enhancing" (liked sugar), had its own blood supply network, and produced inhibin B hormone. I'm now 17 months post-sugery (TAH-BSO) and 12 months post-chemo with no recurrence. I'm so happy to see you doing well! ❤

"Ants are wasps that learned how to work together" is a terrifying take. Thank you Hank.

I love this rant type explanation, it’s much more like a natural train of thought, and I love watching him just talk and think

Hank: *rambles and explains things very well for 20 minutes* Me: I am an anthill.

I’m so glad hank is In remission, we’ve lost too many great people to cancer. I’m glad we didn’t lose him as well.

Have you read the essay/story "The Goddess of Everything Else"? It makes a really nice metaphor between cancer in multicellularity, selfishness in social animals, and conquest in nations

I like to think about the genes being selected for kind of like a popular book--it's not the physical books themselves that are being passed on/reprinted, it's the story inside them.

I can see how this was difficult to articulate and I think you did a good job. The ant metaphor helped a lot to help me follow you. At any point that someone with a fair amount of science background starts talking about what cells "want" and "think", I'm like, ok we're in deep here lol. Glad to hear you're in remission and wishing you all the best moving forward. (... And selfishly waiting for more Delete This/Wet or Dry because Katherine is my favorite in the Vlogbrothers universe.)

Thank you, Hank. I'm 59 now, but I was 16 in 1980 when my 43 year old Dad died of lymphoma. You have so many people who watch you so that IF cancer affects their lives, at least they'll have a better knowledge of cancer. Believe me, it'll help. Because of you and because you LIVED! Again, thank you, Hank.

Hank, I do have really bad health anxiety and this has helped me a lot. I’m very glad I get to share the time I’m on this planet with you also.

I've been watching you since I was 18 years old, and you guys inspired me to start my own RU-vid channel at that age. I'm now turning 32, and I'm still making videos haha. Congratulations on being in remission, Hank. I am happy to keep hearing you talk all these years.

I absolutely LOVE this hank talking through his through process...I could listen to fucking HOURS of this... I want more of these...all the time...anytime you're thinking through anything...PLEASE do it like this. This is the hank I never knew I always wanted. I also love how introspective and grand your thought processes have been since your diagnosis. I know that, it must have been a horrible time, going through the scariness of cancer and the pain and vulnerability of taking us along with so much of that ride... but, I think when we as humans glimpse our mortality and thus our humanity...it makes us think differently not just in how we see the world but how we think about or even talk about the world. our internal and external vocabulary for how we talk about and describe the world and concepts around us...changes. Sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. For someone who is already so intelligent and has such a strong vocabulary and ability to think in the abstract...it's having an even more outsized effect and I love it on you. it looks good on you man. I could see you drinkin' some mushroom tea or DMT or Ketamine or something and blowing my mind with what thoughts and ideas came to you from that... This idea of thinking of your individual cells as ants apart of an ant colony and cancer being one stray ant that ain't going with the plan definitely has some promise. With a little more talking it out I think you'll get there. It's like a comedian when they think of something funny but are trying to figure out how to make it a joke...you got all the pieces you need, i think you just need to figure out how to put the pieces together. As always, Love ya bro. Looking forward to more for you, esp if they are deep thought vids like this.

Thank you for this, Hank. I was treated for cancer last year (no evidence of active disease so far, yay!) and this explanation made me tear up. i'm so grateful to have new perspective on it.

As someone who has lived with increased cancer risk my entire life (family history, living in Southeast Kentucky, being alive in the 21st century, smoking for 7 years, drinking for 12, etc), this gives me a little more perspective on what to expect when it finally does hit me. Thank you, Hank, you're the best.

Hank is one of the greatest educators of our time. Not only is he constantly seeking knowledge and sharing it in a fantastic way, he is doing it as he's going through one of the greatest horrors one can go through.

I am studying medicine, and spend a fair amount of time at the hospital, and I get to bear witness to people having the best and worst days of their life. And I really get frustrated at the weakness in the 'battling cancer' metaphors, or people 'being brave ' because there are a whole range of experiences that are not accurately depicted. Cancer has this mythology and this stigma and fear associated with it, and I really appreciate you trying to find a way to explain what cancer is, partially because I will be stealing the odd metaphor to help me explain to patients what is happening and to try and demystify the experience as much as possible. Cancer sucks, but I am so impressed at how you are using this really shitty experience, to try and make it into a way to educate people.

I love the ant analogy, I’ve done quite a lot of research on cancer and I’ve found something else that helps my understanding is looking at what people used to believe cancer was before they really knew about cancer, (The Emperor of All Maladies is a great read on the history of cancer). Maybe in a broader context than what the cells are actually doing, but could expand understanding.

I'm 3 days away from my 2nd treatment of ABVD and your comedy special "P*ssing out Cancer" helped me laugh and cry and explain things to so many humans in my life. Seeing this video, and watching the inner workings of your brain as you put together the Trent the Ant analogy is amazing. Thanks for your content and humor and honesty. Its been invaluable for me on my own NSHL journey. 🖖✌️

I recently beat Stage 2 grade 3a Non-Hodgkins follicular lymphoma myself! Happy for you Hank!

I hope you create more videos like this. Honestly, I really enjoyed hearing you talk through these ideas.

I don't understand the sciencey stuff, but I think in TFIOS it's phrased more like cancer is "made of you", which is similar to "cancer is you", but not quite the same. I'm not sure that's what you're getting at, but sometimes shifting a little bit can help? (also I love hearing the trains of thought that get you to the Fancy Science Thought that we normally hear!)

Thank you for sharing yourself and your time. It is precious.

This made me understand how cancer works for the first time! The ant analogy was helpful to start and then go deeper into cancer in a human body and the genes driving things

This brings to mind the cancer that dogs can get, which is actually mutated cells from one particular dog that lived thousands of years ago. It’s as if a cancer figured out to actually perpetuate itself as a separate organism, rather than dying when its host died like every other cancer I’ve ever heard about.

So cancer is a selfish ant! That's a great way to think about it. Glad to hear you are in remission hank! Thanks for a great video ❤

You're right that the natural selection analogy is kinda hard to grasp, most people get the general idea but the specifics is what this explanation relies on. I think there's another context most people have direct experience with that might work well... Let's say your body is a company, The You Company™️! Every organ is its own little department: marketing, customer service, logistics, you get the idea. They all rely on eachother, but there's separate tasks and office spaces for each department. Imagine each cell is one worker at The You Company™️. Now, if one sneaky lil guy decides "hey, what if I could just not follow the rules" and starts hiring people (mitosis in the workplace is a tough comparison, bear with me) who acts the same way. They start asking for budget increases, busting down walls to spread out their office space, siphoning whatever resources they can to benefit their clique. The problem arises when they can't be fired. They tell HR that "actually my dad is the CEO of The You Company™️ and he said you can't fire me haha", they hide their guys in one department by sitting in the middle surrounded by healthy workers, they lie to HR when confronted with "these ain't the cells you're looking for" and now they are really starting to make running the company tough. Building cubicles, hire more of their buddies, give themselves huge bonuses, max out their expense accounts, take over marketing and start printing posters of themselves looking smug. Lots of the money the company's got is being drained into their banks accounts. Oh no! Now accounting takes a pay cut major enough that they have to quit or survive on whatever crumbs the cancer department hasn't gotten to. Accounting doesn't last long, and there's your department (organ) failure. The You Company™️ needs to bring out external help to survive: they call... idk the cops..? And they bust down the door and arrest all the sneaky boys they can, but cops aren't very smart, so they just kinda arrest everyone hired recently, cancer or not. If sneaky boys remain in the building once the cops leave, they probably learned how to evade arrest by hiding in a locker or showing off their punisher bumper stickers. Now they can hire more guys, tell em those tricks, and next time the cops come, they might not be able to catch all the new hires, because half of em have fake ID cards that say they've been there for years. I'll stop here, but you should get the idea I hope. Another bit: you could consider a cancer to be a new, parasitic organ/organism thats like... a lil piece of you going rogue and deciding it's gonna do it's own thing, flipping the bird at the rest of you. Pretty rude tbh

I was being diagnosed with both systemic mastocytosis (overgrowth of mast cells) and inflammatory breast cancer at around the same time. Comparing them helped me understand what makes cancer more than just "more cells." Also, the anime Cells At Work has some interesting cancer episodes that explain how it is "selfish" and stops acting in the interest of the organism, including "punching" through organ walls, etc. In mastocytosis, the mast cells are still trying to work together, there's just too many cooks in the kitchen.

Your "working through it" turns out to be significantly more succinct and self-consistent than a lot of my "final version" efforts. I'd say you've basically arrived at an effective way to communicate these concepts. Either way, it's a great think piece. I immediately digressed to thinking about human societies as the control mechanisms that allow individual humans to cooperate for the advancement of society rather than strictly individual benefit … and how selfish/individualistic/power hungry persons behave exactly the same way as cancerous cells-transgressing and subverting those cooperative mechanisms. Ultimately to basically the same effect.

I like how Hank's two props that he had on hand to use were 2 pointy sharp things

Hi Hank. Thanks for producing this video. I’m struggling through cancer myself and have spent a lot of time trying to understand what cancer actually is, and how it comes into being. It plainly sucks and I feel unlucky. I really do relate to the topic and I hope that you have a favorable outcome and will be making science accessible for as long as there are interesting topics to cover and willing listeners that have a strong curiosity to understand (or at least try to understand) the nature of reality. Keep it up, please. Science geek, out.

the sci-show video about the "immortal dog" is what made me make the conceptual shift in my head about cancer. i think the concepts you were wrestling with here combined with that could be synthesized into a more succinct explanation of what you're getting at. seeing you work through this in real time made me laugh a bit because i know i must sound similar when i'm stream-of-adhd-consciousness working through something to people at my university.

I really enjoyed this uncensored exploration. Thank you for sharing it. I have a much better understanding of Cancer now and hadn't quite made all those leaps. I was able to follow it, though I suspect you will be able to put it in more succinct phrasing shortly. But the basic idea of our bodies being a multicellular organism that work together and the cancer cells being like "yea, Imma gonna go back to every Cell for Itself" is really neat. And screwed up.

This video made perfect sense to me somehow lol 😅 thanks hank for explaining it in such a way that it's easier to understand ❤ I hope you're feeling better 🫂

I think the tricky part is the understanding of what an organism is. There are complicated definitions of what an organism is, but for this conversation I think it's easiest to define an organism as a structure composed of smaller parts. Cells are composed of atoms. Animals are composed of cells. Societies are composed of animals. Each of these is an organism, and successful organisms have a high PROBABILITY of reproduction. Probability is key, because sometimes a higher organism is more successful when specific individuals composing that organism are less successful. The probability of the high-order organism reproducing is directly dependent on some of the low-order organisms having lower probabilities. The natural selection of the high-order organism is countering the natural selection of the low-order organisms. Tumors occurs when the natural selection of the low-order organism overcomes the natural selection of the high-order organism. It's a probability spike.

Love you Hank. I am so proud of you for keeping us updated with you . Also teaching so many of us . Most of all doing it while I’m pain and sacred. As someone who suffers from chronic pain and other ailments. I know it’s so hard to do the everyday and show up for others. Keep kicking ass love ❤❤❤

I had no idea who he was until I randomly saw his video of when he was diagnosed and starting chemo just a few days after my stem cell transplant for my bone marrow cancer. I remember feeling encouraged by how he can conjure the energy to shoot video and talk to a camera as I was recovering from a high dose of melphalan chemotherapy. The side effects were awful and I didn’t have the energy to even sit in my chair and turn on my computer for a month, let alone work and present information to an audience. Solid tumors are scary, I feel lucky I have a blood cancer that’s easily treatable despite it having been metastatic at diagnosis, and incurable. Keep up the recovery and sharing your journey! It’s encouraging to see someone else understand and explain going through this dreadful adventure.

Holy wow! Well, I would like to say congratulations on your own personal extinction event! Glad to still have you around, explaining the intricate world around and within us and just being generally awesome. I feel like "congratulations on your own personal extinction event" could be a sticker or something lol

This was one of your best videos ever. I feel like I took a giant leap in understanding not only cancer but also evolution and natural selection.

TierZoo's video on eusocial insects was my first real encounter with the gene as the unit of natural selection. Since bees share more genetic material with their siblings than they do with their parents, their hives very strongly select for behavioral traits that encourage having as many siblings as possible, leading to individual bees being more loyal to the hive than they are to themselves.

so glad to hear you are doing better. hope you are feeling better. you and your brother both have brighten my day on so many occasion. hope you always the best from Northwest Indiana.

The way I've understood Genes as the fundamental unit of Natural Selection is that in order to reproduce, you must have the information required to do so. Genes are the fundamental unit of information in any organism, and if a gene carries information that allows it to be reproduced, then it will be reproduced. Natural Selection can only act on this level of information because all higher levels of organization are pre-determined by the genes, so even if it "wanted" to act on the cell or organism level, there is no mechanism through which it can.

I had testicular cancer diagnosed last September. Had surgery on my birthday 4th of October 2022. Surgery went well and first scan after surgery showed the cancer was gone. My second scan cancer came back and was now in a lymph node in my back. 9 weeks of hell later I got the all clear. Funnily on the same day I got the all clear my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. My 2 scan after getting the all clear is in 2 weeks. Beyond scared but hopefully. Mother is really struggling. Cancer is a fucking dick but pulls out the fighter in us all. Stay strong brother better times ahead 💙 Love from a brother in Ireland trying to kick cancers ass 🇮🇪🤛

As a Brain Cancer survivor who has done a good bit of research on Glioblastomas, and a variety of other cancer cells, I really loved the way you explained such a difficult set of concepts. Being able to convey such difficult things in ways that even kids can grasp it is a gift. The problem with it is that it gave me flashbacks as I fought not once, but twice to outsmart it. It literally is like a sort of extraterrestrial parasite that was locked in my skull and would use my brain as it's food. And there would be no way to get it out!!! Its cloaking itself from my own natural defenses, and when confronted with massive weapons such as radiation and/or chemical warfare, it survives!!! It's not only able to survive like the sneaky parasite that it is, but now it knows what to expect in future attacks!!! It is constantly improving its defensive and offensive capabilities to survive and ramp up multiplication of its force. Cancer cell's mutation power is insane. Like not of this planet. (the movie "Life" gave me nightmares as it is a horror movie about a very unique, never seen before, alien organism that despite it's size had tremendous abilities and intelligence). That's how I envision Cancer and why I think that soon, immunotherapy treatment options will become the go-to strategy to defeat this monster. Teach the immune system to detect the cloaking mechanism and other subtle hints that Cancer cells use against the body, in order to hunt them exclusively without dropping nukes and anthrax that kills all the good cells we actually need. One day I hope, cancer will be considered no more than a nuisance like the common cold.

I like you, Hank, am a huge D&D nerd. Cancer IMO, in D&D terms, is a Lich. A good wizard gone bad. Someone who got lost in the sauce and got obsessed with immortality and decides to do whatever it takes to survive. Damn the cost or the collateral damage. You can kill a Lich but it comes back unless you kill the phylactory. Cancer has huge Necromancy vibes.

Dude, this is the sequel to your single-celled dog video! I would be interested in a part three.

I love you Hank! You’re my biggest inspiration to move forward and keep learning in life!!

This is, I think, my *favorite* Hank Green video ever. This unedited work through style is fucking beautiful. More of this please. You can just forget editing. This is good.

Thank you for putting out content in this format of conversation-like familiarity! Your cadence and the subject matter and the way it felt, it reminded me so much of my dad who I lost in May this year. We would sit and have discussions and teach each other about subjects and talk through things that we were learning together so we could solidify in our minds and find ways to communicate the info to others who weren’t as attuned to each others wavelength as we were to each other. He would have liked your videos Hank. He loved to think and spent most of the last few years reading every article he could and watching documentaries since he couldn’t work physically anymore.

I'm enjoying the rambling nature of watching you worl thru this

I know you hear this a lot lately, but I have an immense amount of respect for how you've turned this arguably traumatic health crisis into a learning experience for you and for us. I followed what you were saying, and you're right, it's pretty wild to think about.

So many of these ideas you talk about here and in that book "The Selfish Cell" reminds me of a song called "This Too Shall Pass" from 2005 by Danny Schmidt. I wonder if the author was a fan: We think too big, we think our self is one whole thing And we claim that this collection has a name and is a being But deep inside, when every cell divides It sets upon the rule that states self-interest is divine Cancer, too, lives by this golden rule That you must do unto the others as the others unto you All for the best, cause that’s all the life accepts And so we kill it like a buffalo, with awe and with respect

You’re newest video on climate change was privated while I was watching it. Suddenly in the middle it was unavailable, that’s never happened to me before!

this video was so wildly informative. i knew that basically cancer reproduces faster but it’s crazy how small you have to go to get to the cause. genes are crazy :o anyways, i’m so happy that you’re in remission!!!

We love you Hank, I loved watching your train of thought on this. Can't wait for you to feel 100% again

Your crash course videos helped me get through college. I'm a nurse now. I just wanted to say thank you.

This is awesome content. It's like being in the writer's room and knowing Hank is not at his best but it's so important to him to communicate science he has to wing a 20 minute video. This is a bitter bliss, listening to Hank mind dump.

Thanks for sharing your process as you come to an understanding of your experience. Pleased that you're in remission. Stay well.

Hank for president 2024!!!

This rant was spot on what I needed.. I, sort of, understood cancer development but the ant analogy was spot on.. PS, I'm wearing the same T-shirt today..

The Selfish Gene is a great book to help conceptualize this topic! I would like to comment how much I enjoyed my personal takeaway from the The Selfish Gene. The Gene Theory took away an egotistical perspective I had on the reason for my being here. From what I understood, I (and other humans and organisms combined) are just a byproduct that arose from genes just trying to create hosts to better their fecundity, their reproductivity. That means my whole experience and the experiences combined of all organisms (memories, affect, knowledge, our brains, hearts etc.) were never the main goal, it was a lucky byproduct that came from genes needing better hosts to reproduce. Therefore, humans were created! (And animals, and plants, and all other organisms that inherit genes alike!) Some people I talk to find my takeaway sad and even hopeless to think that human beings and their ability for consciousness, feelings, etc are "just" a byproduct, and I can understand that. But I ultimately think there's something kind of cool about having sentience, memories, experiences, and consciousness and all of this experience that I (and all organisms, including humans) experience while not even being the primary goal. It's kinda cool to be the sidebar occurrence, or the unsuspected happening, but still feel like the main character... And above all knowing that, I'm not. I am not the main character at all. (I as in myself, but really as the human race.) **All this is only to be applied if we accept the assumption I proposed in that humans are indeed a byproduct of gene survival, which could 100% be a false perspective** :)

big biology nerd here so I already knew the gene stuff but I like the way you explained it! You have given me good words to use the next time I must explain to someone :3 proud of you for getting through treatment hank!

Thank you for taking us with you on this thought journey, it is clear to me now that my thought processes are a lot slower than yours. I am not saying that it is a bad thing, I just found it slightly hard to follow all your thoughts throughout the video, but at least I found it interesting. I got a little bit stuck on the fact that ants are mostly identical copies with the same genes that they get from the ant queen. Thinking about the difference between cells in our bodies and that they normally don't work for their individual good, but for the good of the organism, it then becomes profoundly interesting that cancer cells seem to break that pattern in order to create more of themselves, which is not good for the body and organism. Contrasting that to how different humans can be within the limits of a human being, it is surely a lot to take in and deal with in terms of thought process and sorting out what we want to use, maybe to increase our own chance of survival. Thank you again for all these thoughts, it sure is a lot. Then again, if we can't improve ourselves from dealing with facts, how are we going to improve our chances of survival? This will be on my mind for quite some time.

I wholly agree. I've never heard anybody else put it in those terms before, yet I have thought the same thing for years. Slightly different context: I was growing vegetables, and it struck me how miraculous life itself is, that this tiny little seed would soon grow into a huge tomato plant, in one season. Yet, when they were seedlings, some would thrive, some would grow all 'twisted' and appear to be doomed. However, that wouldn't always determine whether the final plant actually survived. It was environmental and sometimes, the 'twisted' plant was more suited to the particular environmental conditions that year, and would be the one that thrived. It reminded me of the, "life finds a way'" quote. The unlucky ones in one set of conditions would be the lucky ones in another; or, there'd simply be no life at all...

It's really cool to see this part of science communication, the initial thoughts in service of a better explanation

The ant analogy is so good. I've never really thought too hard about the individual cell of a body in the same way before, but as a layperson, the rouge ant concept feels useful, if not fully there yet.

Why'd you delete the climate video?

LOVED THIS! Would love to see a sequel where you take it to the next level: what's with the classes of cancers and how, though they are genetically you (an individual person), do they become cancerous in similar ways across our population (ie: Hodginks Lymphona, Adenocarcinoma, etc.)?

I always love when you explain a topic better than multiple courses of my bio major did. Thank you!!

Just wanted to say I actually really enjoyed that and it made a lot of sense to me. The natural sellection at the gene level thing I’d forgotten and not understood propperly. Some very cool analogies in there. And congratulations. I like all others here I’m sure are glad to hear about the remission if that is indeed the case of course I’m a lazy researcher :) so just happened across that in another comment on this vid. But yeh. I love your work, and the content from all the channels you’re aphiliated with and I’ve learnt heaps and had a bunch of laughs from a bunch of them. Also liked the analogy of the genes being the story reproduced rather than the physical book… if we remember what those are these days of course :) also from another comment on this vid. To take that one step further, if the book is the multicellular organism and the story is the genes maybe cancer is what happens when a page of the book learns to change its own story to reproduce itself… or maybe a better analogy is where that book is scanned into an eBook and the file corrupts itself so one page or chapter or whatever just keeps getting copied and copied until the file becomes so long and disorganised that it becomes unreadable? Sorry all. This was meant to be a short comment but I don’t really know how to do those especially when its after midnight in New Zealand and I’m being nocturnal as usual.

This is how I rant when I'm drunk, and I'm loving every second of it!

I completely agree. We barely understand Cancer. Almost a century ago, my Great Uncle George started working for an organisation studying Cancer. He was already working as a GP and welcomed the invitation to join and cure cancer. By 1938 it became apparent that this was a much bigger beast. In 1939 he had to take 6 year break to deal with more pressing matters. When he passed away in the 1970s after a lengthy career in the field, Surgery was still the main treatment. To lose a friend today from a specific type of leukaemia, seems intentionally cruel.

A good friend of mine found out he had cancer ( I believe Hodgkins Lymphoma) not long after hearing about Hank. It was hard for me because like myself he's a father with a baby daughter at home. Listening to Hank explain everything and be so positive has helped me understand and have hope for my friend. He's a great new father and I really hope he's around long enough to see his little girl grow up.

Watching this on my second monitor while I'm doing actual cancer research on the other is an extremely specific kind of unhinged vibe.

I had never thought of cancer in terms of evolution, but now it makes so much more sense! I'm definitely going to be using the ant colony analogy if I ever need to explain it to anyone else.

"Treating cancer is an extinction event" is a really nice sequel to that single celled dog SciShow video.

I've been watching you and John since your Brotherhood 2.0 era- middle school days for me. I hadn't thought about cancer with this frame of perspective and I'm now, once again, so gratful that you have made me, over nearly 15 years after finding Vlogbrothers, made me consider what makes things do what they do.

Another way to look at it is that cancerous growth is a local maxima for the cancer cell. It can make more of itself most efficiently in the near term by going rogue and replicating like mad. Since genes don’t do long term planning, they just do it. We aren’t just made of all cancer because that strategy can work in the long term. Multicelled animals have found a bigger, longer term maxima of sexual reproduction. But it’s not like they think about it, it’s just how they’re constrained to grow.

no comments? sending love to you, hank. happy you’re doing well.

would love a video on colony organisms because it really is a spectrum - a man-o-war to an ant colony, vs a person, vs humanity, man, the whole planet, dude, the whole planet is one big organism and we're all just cells, man -- the universe itself is a being, and we're-- i know they're researching psychedelics for cancer anxiety, would be funky to watch this on those for that.

I’m currently seeing a haematologist-oncologist to investigate possible lymphoma/leukaemia. (They say they’re not sure yet which it is coz I have labs and symptoms consistent with both groups!). It’s very scary, but Hank’s videos really help me. Thank you Hank. This episode reminds me of the SciShow episode about the “single cellular dog.”

One of the reasons natural selection is so hard to grasp is that most of the descriptions treat the cell as if it's an intelligent being making decisions. Descriptions like "it wants to" help that along.

That was really cool! I've never thought about cancer like that. It absolutely blew my mind when I realized that ants were basically an extension of the queen rather than individuals. Ants really are like single celled organisms and its crazy that that works for them (and wasps etc.)

As someone with a BSc in Biology and MSc in Bioinformatics, I think you did a great job explaining it. It's such a fascinating topic. I think most people fall into 'design' traps, though. (Even if they think intelligent design is stupid!) The zeitgeist suggests that organs and cells do what they're meant to do, because that's what they are created to do. What they fail to consider is that it's *all* metastability. The only reason biology looks like neatly characterised boxes is because that's the best way our cognition found to interact with the natural world. It's more of a cascade of random quirks of chemistry that happen to fall into complex piles. Bizarre, beautiful.

it just breaks my heart that one of the penultimate educators of our entire generation is freely having this brain storm about the absurdity of advanced multicellular existence and that most people consuming this will probably not have the capacity to really grapple with the existential discomfort of it to have independent conversations outside of this. Love you Hank, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and experience. You're a treasure.

Oooh, I like the "species extinction event" term for cancer death, or successful cancer treatment. In at least one case (HeLa cell line), Henrietta's death from cervical cancer did not result in that, because of the way her cell samples had been looted.

@5:30 I'm reminded of a realization in the Baru Cormorant books that gay, lesbian and ace people can be societally/biologically important by contributing to the safety and wellbeing of their reproducing family members! And now I wanna cry again a little. Love you Hank!

I think that even more than the "genes" it would be accurate to say the information represented by the genes. Like you said, your cells aren't in your children, and the atoms that make up the genetic molecules also aren't transferred, but the information represented by those molecules is what is transferred.

I think this was an accidental publish Edit - appears to be fixed now

I feel like a good furthering of your explanation of cancer as a “single cell organism that shares your DNA acting on its own behalf” is the extinction of the Tasmanian Devil by transmissible cancer. And similarly, Canine Transmissible Venereal Tumour (CTVT), which is another type of transmissive cancer that dogs can catch. Like, there is a single celled “dog” out there existing and hopping rides across other dogs.

Framing that may help: Every time that a trait mutates that *doesn't* emphasize gene replication, it just dies out. Also: Every specialized cell in your body has *all* the genes - just not expressed/activated. The Liver cell has heart genes and brain genes just hanging out. I like the "ants are cells" metaphor - useful to illustrate that the queen is basically like a stem/reproductive cell in that it's going to kick out a ton of specialized cells that can't do what it does.

I'm so glad you're in complete remission. What a wonderful feeling.

@HanksChannel - Tazmanian devils' contagious face-biting cancer totally supports this idea.

This is an excellent explanation. I'm going to use it if and when I need to help a kid understand cancer (which is very likely to happen because I work with kids).

The sudden realization that the intense competition going on in my body, has accidentally sprung forth my person is the most jarring part of this. 😅