Curious about networks, creativity, or cancer? Look to the ant.

As a little girl I remember observing ants building their anthills in our backyard. I am not sure what motivated me but I carefully placed an ant inside the entrance of a neighboring colony. Several minutes later the tiny body of the ant was placed outside the opening. Perhaps as a talisman to deter any large scale invasion. 

Later as a scientist I was aware of the chemicals that create networks in colonies in the absence of a central authoritarian figure. I listened with intrigue to Debrah Gordon, a biologist at Stanford University and her popular 2003 TED talk.

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I am a big fan of storytelling. Listening to TED radio podcast during long runs pretty much drives my curiosity and creativity for the writing process. The show today opened with audio of crackling and scratching and we discover Deborah describing tiny microphones picking up sound as the ants walk across. Here is Deborah's 2014 TED talk. 

We learn a bit about ant biology and  behavior within the colony infrastructure. The individual ants are responding to signals and chemicals that determine when to look for food, when to stay inside, and how a variety of decisions are made in a system that lacks overt structures of order or control.

A specific example of ants following a trail to a picnic and how they specialize in "clustered resources" to use interactions to recruit members of the colony to your picnic blanket describes a scenario most of us have witnessed.

Thinking of the chaotic but successful networking of growth and survival from the perspective of an ant, there are important correlations to consider. She explores and links these findings to another example of seemingly random and exponential growth...

Now this is a place where I think we might be able to learn something from ants about cancer. I mean, first, it's obvious that we could do a lot to prevent cancer by not allowing people to spread around or sell the toxins that promote the evolution of cancer in our bodies, but I don't think the ants can help us much with this because ants never poison their own colonies. 

But we might be able to learn something from ants about treating cancer. There are many different kinds of cancer. Each one originates in a particular part of the body, and then some kinds of cancer will spread or metastasize to particular other tissueswhere they must be getting resources that they need. So if you think from the perspective of early metastatic cancer cells as they're out searching around for the resources that they need, if those resources are clustered, they're likely to use interactions for recruitment, and if we can figure out how cancer cells are recruiting, then maybe we could set traps to catch them before they become established.

A huge take home message emerges here. These systems have been in place for over 130 million years. They are certainly worthy of exploration. In the absence of central control across a variety of landscapes and geographies they have been thriving and evolving. Cancer cells and ants both--we need to pay attention.

Thoughtful discussions about content development and outcomes analytics that apply the principles and frameworks of health policy and economics to persistent and perplexing health and health care problems

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