Close up of cancer cells in the cervix. (American Cancer Society/Getty Images) 
 
 Richard Nixon declared war on cancer 43 years ago. 
 
 He was about one billion years too late. 
 
 According to a recent study, cancer has been around as long as multicellular life — and it’s not going anywhere. 
 
 “Cancer is as old as multicellular life on Earth and will probably never be completely eradicated,” said lead researcher Thomas Bosch of Germany’s Kiel University in a press release. The study was just published in the journal Nature Communications. 
 
 The paper — “Naturally occurring tumours in the basal metazoan Hydra” — looked at an ancient organism not unlike coral. 
 
 Scientists already knew that such organisms carried genes that can cause cancer in humans. Bosch and his team provided evidence that they also can develop tumors. 
 
 And the tumors they found were similar to those found in humans. One affected only female Hydra and was likened to ovarian cancer. 
 
 “Our study also makes it unlikely that the war on cancer proclaimed in the 1970s can ever be won,” Bosch said. “However, knowing your enemy from it origins is the best way to fight it and win many battles.” 
 
 But when it comes to cancer — according to the World Health Organization, the planet’s leading cause of death — rhetoric about winning battles seems empty. 
 
 Some estimate the U.S. government has spent more than $100 billion fighting cancer. 
 
 Sure, treatment has improved. But will cancer ever go the way of polio? 
 
 In an interview with The Washington Post, Bosch explained further. 
 
 “When, during evolution, cells became more complicated,” Bosch said, “there must be communication. Cells must have a precise plan.” 
 
 The problem: Plans go awry. 
 
 “The cell makes a wrong decision,” Bosch said. He referred to Siddhartha Mukherjee’s 2011 book “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.” 
 
 Cancer, Mukherjee wrote, is: 
 
 a disease caused by the uncontrolled growth of a single cell. This growth is unleashed by mutations — changes in DNA that specifically affect genes that incite unlimited cell growth. In a normal cell, powerful genetic circuits regulate cell division and cell death. In a cancer cell, these circuits have been broken, unleashing a cell that cannot stop growing. 
 
 Our bodies are supposed to eliminate mistaken cells in what Bosch calls “programmed cell death.” 
 
 Tumor cells, Bosch said, neutralize cell death, letting “wrong” cells grow unchecked. 
 
 Though such mistakes can be treated by medical science, they will always be made — and cancer will likely always exist. 
 
 In fact, Bosch criticized the war on cancer further. 
 
 “The logic behind it was pretty naïve,” he said. “‘We can send people to the moon, we can eradicate cancer.’ Now the biologist says, ‘Sorry, that can never work.’ ” 
 
 Don’t like this fatalistic view? Don’t shoot the messenger. 
 
 “Some people ask, ‘How can you live with that?’ ” Bosch said. ” ‘Isn’t that very sad?’ I say, ‘I am a cell biologist with an evolutionary interest. I just watch the cells and have to tell the community what is going on.’ ” 
 
 H/t Science Daily ||||| Every year around 450,000 people in Germany are diagnosed with cancer. Each one of them dreams of a victory in the battle against it. But can cancer ever be completely defeated? Researchers at Kiel Univ. (CAU) have now reached a sobering conclusion. 
 
 “Cancer is as old as multi-cellular life on earth and will probably never be completely eradicated,” says Prof. Thomas Bosch in his latest research results. The study by an international team led by Bosch was published in Nature Communications. 
 
 The so-called cancer genes are ancient 
 
 The causes of tumors are the so-called cancer genes. The question of when evolution started producing tumors is an issue that the scientists Tomislav Domazet-Lošo and Diethard Tautz from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön have been investigating for several years, using bio-informational methods and databases that they have developed in-house. 
 
 “During the search for the origin of the cancer gene, we unexpectedly made a discovery in the ancient group of animals,” explains Domazet-Lošo. He is one of the authors of the present study and is currently working at the Ruder Bošković Institute and the Catholic Univ. of Croatia in Zagreb. “Our data predicted that the first multi-cellular animals already had most of the genes which can cause cancer in humans.” What was missing until now was, on the one hand, evidence that these animals can actually suffer from tumors and, on the other, the molecular understanding of the mechanisms of tumor formation in these simple animals. 
 
 Cause of tumors: error in the programming of cell death 
 
 The research team has now achieved an impressive understanding of the roots of cancer. Bosch has been investigating stem cells and the regulation of tissue growth in Hydra, a phylogenetic old polyp, for many years. “Now we have discovered tumor-bearing polyps in two different species of Hydra, an organism very similar to corals,” emphasizes Bosch regarding the first result of the new study. This provides proof that tumors did indeed exist in primitive and evolutionary old animals. 
 
 The team also tracked down the cellular cause of the tumors along the entire body axis. For the first time they were able to show that the stem cells, which are programmed for sex differentiation, accumulate in large quantities and are not removed naturally by programmed cell death. Interestingly, these tumors affect only female Hydra polyps and resemble ovarian cancers in humans. 
 
 “When undertaking more detailed molecular analyses of the tumors we found a gene that becomes active dramatically in tumor tissue and that normally prevents the programmed cell death,” explains Alexander Klimovich, a scholarship student at the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation at the Zoological Institute of Kiel Univ. and co-lead author of the paper about the second find. “As a non-functioning cell death mechanism is also made responsible for the growth and spread of tumors in many types of human cancer, striking similarities appear here to cancer in humans.” 
 
 The third finding of the scientists was to show that tumor cells are invasive. This means that if tumor cells are introduced into a healthy organism, they can trigger tumor growth there. Therefore Bosch reaches the following conclusion from his research into Hydra species, “The invasive characteristic of cancer cells is also an evolutionary old feature.” 
 
 Tumors have deep roots in evolution 
 
 The funds that are being deployed throughout the world in the campaign against cancer are enormous. It was estimated that in the U.S. alone, more than 500 billion dollars were invested in cancer research by 2012. The worldwide research has led to improved preventative, diagnostic and treatment methods, which can definitely record successes. However, every second person affected by cancer still succumbs to the disease today. In Germany alone every fourth person dies of cancer and this trend is rising. 
 
 These figures were an incentive for the National Institute of Health in the U.S. to launch a network of Physical Science-Oncology Centers, a new initiative that seeks to bridge intellectual barriers between diverse scientific disciplines. Paul Davies, a well-known theoretical physicist and popular science writer who now leads one such center in Phoenix, Arizona, recently concluded, “Clearly, we will fully understand cancer only in the context of biological history.” 
 
 According to the research team led by Bosch, the findings of primordial tumors in Hydra are a breakthrough step in that direction. “Our research reconfirms that primordial animals such as Hydra polyps provide an enormous amount of information to help us understand such complex problems as cancer. Our study also makes it unlikely that the ‘War on Cancer’ proclaimed in the 1970s can ever be won. However, knowing your enemy from its origins is the best way to fight it, and win many battles,” says Bosch. ||||| WASHINGTONPlain old bad luck plays a major role in determining who gets cancer and who does not, according to researchers who found that two-thirds of cancer incidence of various types can be blamed on random mutations and not heredity or risky habits like smoking. 
 
 The researchers said on Thursday random DNA mutations accumulating in various parts of the body during ordinary cell division are the prime culprits behind many cancer types. 
 
 They looked at 31 cancer types and found that 22 of them, including leukemia and pancreatic, bone, testicular, ovarian and brain cancer, could be explained largely by these random mutations - essentially biological bad luck. 
 
 The other nine types, including colorectal cancer, skin cancer known as basal cell carcinoma and smoking-related lung cancer, were more heavily influenced by heredity and environmental factors like risky behavior or exposure to carcinogens. 
 
 Overall, they attributed 65 percent of cancer incidence to random mutations in genes that can drive cancer growth. 
 
 "When someone gets cancer, immediately people want to know why," said oncologist Dr. Bert Vogelstein of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, who conducted the study published in the journal Science with Johns Hopkins biomathematician Cristian Tomasetti. 
 
 "They like to believe there's a reason. And the real reason in many cases is not because you didn't behave well or were exposed to some bad environmental influence, it's just because that person was unlucky. It's losing the lottery." 
 
 Tomasetti said harmful mutations occur for "no particular reason other than randomness" as the body's master cells, called stem cells, divide in various tissues. 
 
 Tomasetti said the study indicates that changing one's lifestyle and habits like smoking to avoid cancer risks may help prevent certain cancers, but may not be as effective for others. 
 
 "Thus, we should focus more research and resources on finding ways to detect such cancers at early, curable stages," Tomasetti added. 
 
 The researchers charted the cumulative number of lifetime divisions in the stem cells of a given tissue - for example, lungs or colon - and compared that to the lifetime cancer risk in that tissue. 
 
 Generally speaking, tissues that undergo more divisions - thus increasing the probability of random mutations - were more prone to tumors. 
 
 The study did not cover all cancer types. Breast and prostate cancer were excluded because the researchers were unable to ascertain reliable stem cell division rates. (Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Mohammad Zargham)
– When it comes to the war on cancer, it's time to lower our expectations, a new study suggests. Or as the lead author of the study in Nature puts it, "Cancer is as old as multi-cellular life on earth and will probably never be eradicated." German researchers discovered that an ancient organism similar to coral already carried cancer genes that could develop into tumors, explains the website Laboratory Equipment. In fact, one of those ancient tumors is similar to ovarian cancer in humans. Cell mistakes that result in cancer seem to be inevitable as organisms evolve, which makes the idea of "curing cancer" misguided, the study asserts. “The logic behind it was pretty naive,” researcher Thomas Bosch of Kiel University tells the Washington Post. "'We can send people to the moon, we can eradicate cancer.'" He and his team suggest we focus more on understanding how the disease occurs and treating it rather than hoping for a simple fix. "Our study also makes it unlikely that the ‘War on Cancer’ proclaimed in the 1970s can ever be won," says Bosch. "However, knowing your enemy from its origins is the best way to fight it, and win many battles."