When 12-21-2012 was approaching, a girl in Shanghai, China, left Shanghai for a shelter in a small village far away, hoping to escape the catastrophe of the doomsday. We know that the world did not end on the so-called doomsday, and, with good wishes, we thought all those rumors would be soon gone. They did not. They still linger around us. One day, my friend asked me: do you know why it is so warm this winter? After getting an indifferent "I don’t know", he told me mystically about his theory: the volcanoes in Yellowstone will erupt this year!
People have so many weird ideas, and with the help of internet and especially social media like facebook, twitter, etc., these ideas can go viral. Then faulty ideas may become rumors. Interestingly, tumors are just like rumors. Both spread rapidly, both can boom out of control and both are dangerous. Now let’s make an in-depth comparison between rumors and tumors.
Social phycologists have been studying rumors since long ago. Four concepts have been brought forward to help people understand rumors: motivation, situation, narrative context, and trust. We can find a counterpart for each of these four concepts in tumors.
People are often motivated to find out if a rumor is true. Sometimes it is hard to prove or disprove a rumor. So they rely on watching how other people respond to it. When they cannot disprove it, they pass it on. This is so-called motivation. Tumors, on the other hand, are initiated when they become wrong. Tumors harbor a variety of DNA mutations that frequently undergo scrutinizing by safeguard mechanisms of our body. When the body fails to fix mutated DNA, owing to genetic or environment factors, tumors may begin to develop.
Situation to a rumor is like drought weather to a wildfire. Situations that pose ambiguity or threats to assets (life, health, wealth, group honor, and cherished values) can foster rumors. Government policies which fails to avoid ambiguity to assets, For example, can stir up a lot of rumors in the stock market. Likewise, tumors can not exist without appropriate situations. The environment that surrounds tumors, the so-called niche or tumor microenvironment, plays a far more important role in tumor initiation and development than we originally recognized. Different from rumor situation that usually aids in rumor spreading, tumor niche contains both good and bad components. Several subsets of cells reside in tumor niche, including cancer stem cells, cancer associated fibroblast cells, immune inflammatory cells, endothelial cells, pericytes, and others. These cells can be good or bad, depending on various factors such as their numbers and ratios.
Narrative context is important, too. Chinese people may not get a joke told by an American. Rumors may sound more plausible in one group than another. Likewise, tumors don’t metastasize just anywhere. Certain tumors are predisposed to seed in particular organs. For example, prostate cancer tends to metastasize to the bones, colon cancer to the liver, and stomach cancer to the ovaries. This was first proposed as the “seed-soil” theory by Stephen Paget in 1889.
Trust may be the most important factor to the spread of rumors. Similarly, tumors can not exist without the trust of the immune system. Immune system, except its role in controlling pathogens, may also monitor proliferative cells that may develop into tumors and will kill them when they are threatening the health of the body. Immunosurveillance and succedent immunoediting were proposed to explain how tumors are monitored and even sculpted by immune system. Tumors have developed many ways to win the trust of the immune system and escape being killed. For example, tumors may enter dormancy and stop dividing so that the immune system will mark them as good cells.
Neither rumors nor tumors are like humor. They are not good, and they are not rare. The longer a rumor or tumor has existed, the more it will do harm to the world and our body. It is impossible to live in a world without rumors or tumors, but it is possible to tell a rumor from truth, tumor from normal cell earlier. In that way, we will be able to have more humor when facing both rumor and tumor.
[1] Rumour research can douse digital wildfires. Nature. 2013 493, 135-135, doi:10.1038/493135a
[2] Cancer immunoediting: from immunosurveillance to tumor escape.Nat Immunol. 2002 Nov;3(11):991-8.
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