In June’s issue of Physics World: Physics to be ‘new front in the war on cancer’

In the 40 years since Richard Nixon declared a “war on cancer”, morbidity and mortality rates have stayed depressingly constant but, as Paul Davies writes exclusively in June’s Physics World, physics is now transpiring to be the weapon of choice.

Davies, director of BEYOND: Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University in the US, introduces the US National Cancer Institute’s 12 new centres, funded for five years at $35 million per year, which are encouraging physical scientists to tackle cancer.

In addition to the two conventional models for understanding cell behaviour – the chemical and genetic – Davies adds a third, mechanistic model that he reckons could give physicists an upper hand.

It regards cells as physical objects, with mechanical, electrical and optical properties, whose innards contain Lilliputian pulleys, ropes, levers, conveyors, pumps, rotors and other paraphernalia familiar to physicists. “The challenge is now to unify all three pictures — chemical, genetic and mechanistic,” Davies explains.

As a cell’s behaviour is dictated by which of its tens of thousands of genes are switched ‘on’ or ‘off’, physicists have, for example, started to look for physical reasons why some genes break the norm and switch to a state unsuited to their function – thereby contributing towards the conditions that can result in cancer.

Work underway thanks to the National Cancer Institute’s endowment includes a project to shed light on ‘epigenetics’ – a sort of shadow information network that controls much of the human genome but is very poorly understood.

Other new projects include an attempt to understand how external physical forces such as microgravity can affect cell development as well as the development of new cell-imaging microscopy techniques to find common laws of cancer development.

As Davies acknowledges, it is early days in this new initiative.”[But] the holy grail, for me at least, would be to discover a simple on-off switch for cancer that could be thrown by manipulating a well-understood parameter such as temperature or electro-static potential. That dream may be naïve but a physics approach to cancer management could at least open up a new front in the war on cancer.”

Also in the June edition:

• The $2bn Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer will give new insights into cosmic rays and might even detect dark matter but, as Edwin Cartlidge reports, researchers face a race against time to get the instrument into space after taking a last-minute decision to swap its main magnet.

• Research on a class of geometric symbols known as adinkras, originally from West Africa, could lead to fresh insights into the theory of supersymmetry, explains James Gates, a theoretical physicist from the University of Maryland, US.