Tumors as Teachers: Lessons from Cancer for Futurists

Cancer is horror.

I’ve lost close family members, dear friends and respected colleagues, as have many of us, and we all know people who have struggled and survived its brutality. 1.6 million Americans are diagnosed each year and over 600,000 will die from cancer.??

#Cancer is, as Siddhartha Mukherjee put it in his excellent book by the same name, “The Emperor of All Maladies” (1991).

Its sheer ubiquity and virulence, its “success” as a disease, means it can be a significant source of insights for us as Futurists trying to better understand how technology appears and spreads. It is a biological model for analyzing widescale innovation in new—if challenging -- ways.

Cancer has two characteristics (among many others) that resemble how technology truly evolves: mutation and metastasis.

#Mutations are random variants, mostly the result of unknown causes, different from other cells or organisms. A cancer cell’s mutated #DNA is a twisted and broken thing, an unpredictable, unique abnormality. It is a product of hostile chance.

Many #technological #innovations are also mutations, although not necessarily harmful. As much as we would like to think otherwise, these new things are frequently not intentionally made but are the result of an observation of an unexpected #invention. Technologies often evolve through mutations: the unexpected, tangential outliers of our efforts to create. The history of technology is packed with examples of these.

Cancer also demonstrates #metastasis —the rapid proliferation of deformed cells spreading throughout the body. Metastatic cancer cells do not multiply linearly but #exponentially:?one cells produces two, which in turn produce four, then eight, then sixteen and so on until they spread by the hundreds of millions or billions throughout our human biological landscape.?

They become a horde of cellular marauders.?

In a more positive way (we hope), technologies grow in much the same way, not in neat lines but in what I call “Cascades”. A single technology can spin off into thousands of other technologies, seemingly unrelated to their origin. #Inventor Geniuses and Creation Factories do exist, and their reach is sometimes unfathomable.

The best thinkers about the #future have a certain kind of intellectual bravery and the courage to look outside of comfortable disciplines or widely accepted sources for inspiration and understanding.?

Terence said in 160 B.C. or so “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto” or “I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me”. This attitude can be part of the best of futures thinking.

In that spirit, perhaps we need to see ourselves as least in part as “Oncologists of the Future” (certainly a challenging notion) not afraid of learning from some of the most fearful things of all.

For further information on cancer, I highly recommend the National Cancer Institute website at #cancer.gov.