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t joined the club as an Under-10 from Southampton.

A technical player who is adept in a number of


midfield positions, he made his youth team debut as an Under-16 at the start of the 2013/14 season.
In his debut campaign as a scholar, Scott made 36 appearances across the academy age groups
and made his Under-21 debut, as well as figuring in both FA Youth Cup and UEFA Youth League
triumphs.
He was an Under-21 regular in 2015/16 and featured prominently in our successful UEFA Youth
League title defence, scoring the winner in the quarter-final against Ajax, as well as featuring in
another successful defence of the Youth Cup. Solely working with the oldest academy age group in
2016/17, Scott played in two of our Checkatrade Trophy ties and was a midfield regular.

Honours
Manchester City offer tempting swap deal for
Alexis Sanchez

Manchester City are reportedly offering cash plus Raheem Sterling to Arsenal as part
of their latest effort to sign Alexis Sanchez from the Gunners in a shock development.
Read full story
Source: Daily Mirror
2 weeks ago

Ross Barkley expected to join Chelsea or Tottenham


this week

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Beyond the Somatic Mutation


Theory of Cancer

Dr. Jason FungFollow

Feb 28

“The problem lies not so much in developing new ideas,


but in escaping from old ones” John Maynard Keynes

By 2009, it was clear that the somatic mutation theory (SMT) —


 that cancer was simply a random collection of genetic mutations —
 was leading exactly nowhere. Billions of research dollars and
decades of work yielded virtually no useful treatments. So, in an
uncharacteristically open-minded and insightful move, the
government decided to do something very smart. It asked for help.
But where to get that help? The National Cancer Institute (NCI)
was already giving millions of research dollars to cancer biologists,
cancer researchers, geneticists, physiologists, doctors etc. No, in a
rare moment of clarity, the NCI decided that in order to think
‘outside the box’ you needed people who
professionally live outside cancer’s box. Cancer researchers and
doctors were so far in the box, they couldn’t see outside.

Instead, the NCI funded 12 Physical Science-Oncology Centers


with $15 million each to look into the question of cancer’s origins
and treatment, bringing physicists into the picture and not more
and more of the same biologist/ researchers/ doctors. Rather than
asking the same old questions and getting the same old answers,
physicists would have an entirely new perspective on cancer, and
perhaps this would help move cancer research in a newer, more
productive direction.

Larry Nagahara, the NCI Program director for this initiative said
astutely, “we actually want the [physicists] to ask the questions,”
which will “vary greatly from those asked by biologists. A physicist
may ask…‘what is the energy required for a cancer cell to
metastasize?…What are the forces required for a cancer cell to
move? Hopefully [this] will shed light on how cancer develops as a
disease.”

Dr. Paul Davies was then a professor of physics at the University of


Arizona. He had never looked into cancer before to this new
assignment. He admits that prior to getting the call from the NCI,
he had “no prior knowledge of cancer”, so he had the freedom to
ask some basic questions. He writes, “What struck me from the
outset is that something as pervasive and stubborn as cancer must
be a deep part of the story of life itself. Sure enough, cancer is
found in almost all multicellular organisms, suggesting its origins
stretch back hundreds of millions of years.”

This is quite profound, and seems obvious to an outsider, but may


not be to an insider with his/her ‘curse of knowledge’. Almost
every known multicellular organism gets cancer. Almost every
known cell type in the body (breast, lung, testicle, etc) can become
cancerous. The origins of cancer did not lie in some random
mutation making all these cells go berserk. The origins of
cancer must lie in the origins of life itself.
Oncologists tend to view cancers as some kind of genetic mistake.
Some mutations making cells go crazy and become cancer. But to
Drs. Davies and Lineweaver, another cosmologist and astro-
biologist, the behavior of cancer cells is anything but berserk. Not
at all. It is a highly organized, systemic method of survival. It’s no
accident that cancer survives everything the body throws at it. It’s
not a random collection of genetic mutations. Developing those
specific attributes is as likely as throwing a pile of bricks into the
air and having them land exactly as a house. Considering the
body’s massive deployment of weaponery to kill cancer cells, it is
impossible that cancer survives only as a freak accident. A freak
accident that happens to every cell in the body, in every organism
known to exist? If something seems ‘stupid’ but works (survives),
then by its very definition, it’s not stupid. Yet cancer researchers
and doctors had all treated cancer as some kind of random
collection of stupid genetic mistakes. No, there was stupidity going
on, and it wasn’t the cancer’s.

Another great benefit of bringing in outsiders, especially physicists


is that they bring a fundamentally different attitude to the cancer
problem. Doctors and medical researchers always want ‘evidence’
to prove that something is true. That is, if cancer is due to
smoking, then we must spend decades and millions of dollars to
prove the smoking causes cancer. Each step along the way to the
truth is paved with decades of bickering and demands to ‘see the
evidence’.

That’s fine, but it’s not the way most physical science works. In
theoretical physics, you have a theories, like Newton’s three laws.
When you find an anomaly, like the wave-particle duality of light,
then you must come up with a different theory to explain it. You
may or may not be able to prove the existence of, say, Einstein’s
gravity waves at the time. But if the theory explains the known
facts and the anomalous findings better than the original theory,
then it supplants it. Thus, Einstein was able to find support for his
theories of relativity long before there was actual proof.

Physics embraces the anomaly, because it understands that it is


only by explaining this anomaly that science move forward. The
great American physicist Richard Feynman said “The thing that
doesn’t fit is the thing that’s the most interesting; the part that
doesn’t go according to what you expected”. Medicine, on the
other hand, rejects new theories like a prom queen rejects pimple
faced suitors. If ‘The Man’ says that calories cause obesity, then all
other theories are shouted down. If ‘The Man’ says that cancer is
caused by genetic mutations, then all other theories may apply
elsewhere. They call this process ‘peer-review’, and glorify it as a
religion. Galileo, for example, was not a fan of peer review by the
church. In physics, your theory is only good if it explains the
known observations. In medicine, your theory is only good if
everybody else likes it, too. This explains the rapid pace of
progress in the physical sciences and the glacial pace of medical
research.

In medical research, we might have a hypothesis that dietary fat


causes heart disease. This happened in the 1970s. Here we are in
2018, some 48 years later and we’re still debating the exact same
issue. I work in nephrology (kidney disease) and I’m still
prescribing the same medications and doing the same dialysis as
when I went to medical school 20 years ago.

This was the precise point of bringing in an outside point of view.


Physics moves in leaps and bounds. In quanta, if you will. A single
correct theory, such as Einstein’s relativity or Neils Bohr’s quanta
moves the entire field an incredible distance. Medical science, by
contrast laboriously tries to move a single step at a time and tries
to please all incumbent scientists through the tedious and
stultifying process of peer review and trying to painfully prove
every single step along the journey under the dictatorship of
Evidence Based Medicine. In the field of obesity medicine, we still
debate incessantly about calories, 100 years after it should have
been settled. We still debate about — should we eat 3 meals a day
or 1 meal or 6? Where physics moves at light speed, medicine
moves on foot, taking 2 steps back for every one forward.

Even within medicine, cancer research is a disaster. Even though


medicine moves slowly, there are occasional breakthroughs. So,
for heart disease, you have new procedures, new technology
(pacemakers etc.), new medicines and the death rate from heart
disease, stroke and pneumonia have all fallen significantly in the
last 60 years. Cancer? Not so much. Despite the world of
technology moving on a MagLev bullet train, and the world of
medicine moving at a crawl, cancer remains standing still. This,
despite billions of research dollars every year, more ‘walks for
cancer’ than you can count, more pink ribbons, more tear jerker
stories on the mass media. Nobody wants to hear the truth, but
here it is. The progress on cancer sucks. It really, really sucks.

Enter, the Disruptor. For the first time in 50 years, cancer


medicine might get a breath of fresh air with the atavistic theories.
Cancer was not a random collection of genetic mutations. Cancer
was a targeted de-evolution to a more primitive form of life. The
origins of cancer are the origins of life itself.

(Note for regular readers. I’m sorry because I have more to say
about cancer, but I will take a break from the Cancer series for
now, because of competing real life priorities (how rude!). I will
return to some topics on my regular beat of weight loss, type 2
diabetes for now, with the upcoming release of The Diabetes Code)
 Cancer
 Health
 Genetics
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Dr. Jason Fung


Nephrologist. Special interest in type 2 diabetes reversal and intermittent fasting. Founder of
Intensive Dietary Management Program.

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Ross Barkley has held talks with both Chelsea and Tottenham as he looks set to leave
Everton in a £30million deal before this week's summer transfer window deadline.
Read full story
Source: Daily Mail

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