Biophysical Approach to Understand Life and Cancer

Abstract

Background

From the perspective of biology, the characteristics of life can be categorized as cellular organizations, homeostasis, metabolism, growth, reproduction and heredity, response to stimuli and adaptation to the environment. From the perspective of physics, living organisms are highly ordered, complex, thermodynamically open systems; they are in non-equilibrium phase. According to the second law of thermodynamics, every system in the universe is going to the disorder spontaneously. Maximum entropy signifies a thermodynamic equilibrium which means the death. Today, cancer is a major global health problem and despite the explosive development of our knowledge about the carcinogenesis the “war on cancer” has not yet been won.

Aims

To examine life and cancer together based on current biophysical approach and to shed light on new paradigms.

Materials & Methods

A systematic literature search for publications on a thermodynamic approach to understand life and cancer was conducted in PubMed without language restrictions. The reference lists of identified studies were also used as additional knowledge.

Results

Living organisms exchange entropy and they gain information from the external environment. Information can be stored as memory. Life is a category of emergence like art composed from correct modules. On the contrary, cancer is the emergence of a disease formed by incorrect modules. Cancer is a chaotic disease at least for a limited period and cannot arise from healthy functional tissue units. Chaos of the lower level may be associated with the entropy increase of upper level.

Conclusions

Biologic chaos control is possible.