Transcript Disclaimer – Please note that the following transcript has been machine generated by an AI software and therefore may include errors or omissions.

Robin Daly
Hello, welcome to the YesLife to show . My name’s Robin Daly, host for the show and founder of Yes to Life, the UK’s integrative cancer care charity. One of the aims of the charity is to broaden choice in cancer care and as part of that we’re keen to showcase emerging science to underpin approaches to prevention and care that fall outside of the remit of conventional oncology as we firmly believe there is much on offer there to improve quality of life and outcomes. We recently held an online professional forum to evaluate a fresh perspective on the mechanism and origin of cancer that unusually has come from a lay source from a cancer patient. Such was the success of the event and I’m now going to introduce you to the proponent of these new ideas, Mark Lintern. Over the course of the next few weeks, as this is potentially such an important topic, Mark will be telling us his story and laying out his findings from over eight years research and speaking to Mark over the internet. Hi Mark, brilliant to have you on the show.

Mark Lintern
Thank you for having me, it’s brilliant to be here.

Robin Daly
So we’ve got a lot to talk about. Yours is a story of a road less travelled and a mighty long one at that. In a nutshell after more than eight years of a deep deep dive into cancer science you’ve just presented your fresh perspective on the mechanism and origin of cancer at an event entitled Cancer Through Another Lens and you’re shortly going to publish your book summarizing your findings which is called The Cancer Resolution. Now I said it was a long road but your own story is central to it all so I wanted if we could start out by going back to where it all began. When was the first time that you encountered cancer in your life?

Mark Lintern
okay yeah it was about uh i was around 28 years of age and um i developed a lump on my torso and um yeah i went to the doctor just to have it checked out and i was told it was a sebaceous cyst um so it’s a while ago now um i left it for around six months and it grew more and was becoming more uncomfortable um so i went again to have a second opinion and it was again suggested to be a sebaceous cyst um i left it again another couple of months and it was only a friend of mine when i was out drinking one night that we got discussing cancer for whatever reason i think she had gone for a um a scan of some kind and then i happened to mention to her that i’d got this lump and she she had a look and it was her who actually suggested to me that i should have it removed and a third opinion um and even if that opinion came back as a sebaceous cyst she insisted that i should have it removed so really it’s down to her the reason for me going to get a third um diagnosis and then having it checked out again so i did i went for a third uh check up and again it was suggested that it was sebaceous cyst even though it had changed in color and was a lot larger than it was before but at that point i did insist that i had it taken out so i had a local uh anesthetic and surgery at my local doctors and i distinctively remember um once he’d cut it out he showed it me uh and he asked me a really odd question i thought uh he he i could sense the curiosity and not panic in his voice but concern i should say which was um he asked me how long i’d had it for and it’s just his tone of voice came across a bit funny and i thought that sounds a bit strange um and then didn’t think anything of it and it was a month later that the results came back um so i was called into the doctor’s office uh i went along to the doctor’s um as far as i was aware i was going in to see the nurse so at that point i was waiting uh to be taken in and it was about 20 minutes in the waiting room at the doctor’s and the nurse came out and because i i thought i was going to see the nurse i assumed that this was good news uh but then the nurse came out and she realized that i she was down to see me and then she must have obviously seen the details to show that it was cancer and she came out she apologized that she couldn’t speak to me i would have to see the doctor so she referred me quickly over to a doctor and i was there for another 20 minutes in the waiting room but at that point it dawned on me i realized that it was potentially something bad and that was the longest 20 minutes of my life and i bet just sitting there on my own uh in in the treatment room um and then i was called in and of course i got the diagnosis that it was cancer

Robin Daly
Hmm so amazing really that I mean it’s not an uncommon story but amazing that you’d actually been proactive about asking about this on you know on three occasions there’s actually only your own initiative and the advice of a friend that has got you to the point of a diagnosis without those interventions on your part and your friend’s part you could have been in a much more serious situation some time after that absolutely absolutely yeah so this is one of the things which is highlighted very often in it makes it to parliament because it’s such a serious issue is miss or late diagnosis of people with cancer which is a huge issue in the UK where basically people get sent home to over and over again saying not to worry and even after a few visits to stop whinging basically and being talked about as being some kind of hypochondriac and it’s a tragedy really because you know the one thing that everybody knows about cancer and is a well-established fact is that the earlier it’s caught the better your chances are of dealing with it so unfortunately you sound like another example of that fatal and misdiagnosis so anyway good on you that you’ve got something done about it so where do things go from there

Mark Lintern
Okay, so obviously I had quite an emotional response to that. First, it was denial that, you know, the big C had come to me at such an early age. And then I began, I felt the, just the feeling of shock and then the feeling of being noticeably being alone. Like even though my family was around me, they weren’t on this journey, the same journey. They were on a journey with me, but it was my life that was on the line essentially. So the loneliness of that and the fear of that loneliness really hit home. And then defiance set in. So I was defiant, I was, this wasn’t going to get me. And I mean, even though I wasn’t too sure about the prognosis of how dangerous this particular cancer could be, which it turns out it wasn’t particularly dangerous, which was good news for me. But nevertheless, having that sort of diagnosis makes you really think about your mortality.

Robin Daly
especially at that age.

Mark Lintern
Yeah, why was it happening to me and all that? But I had this I developed this divine attitude of I’m, I’m going to defeat this as I expect people do. And at that point, that’s when I started to do some research, because I already previously asked both the oncologist who performed the second surgery that I had. So there was a second excision to try and eliminate any potential cancer cells that were further around the tumor that hadn’t been removed in the first surgery. So I had a second surgery, okay, two weeks later. But my oncologist couldn’t and my doctor couldn’t tell me why I developed the disease, or which particular DNA damage had caused it. So I wanted to know more, I wanted to prevent it happening in the future. So I just wanted to make sure I was going to be healthy. So I started doing my research. And the more research I did, I tried to learn quite a steep learning curve, the terminology to do with somatic mutation theory, because that’s the dominant dominant theory at the time. And I was convinced, obviously, that DNA was the underlying mechanism of driving the disease. So I just wanted to know more, which DNA genes caused my particular cancer and how could I live a lifestyle that would reduce the damage caused my DNA genes. So that was the initial step.

Robin Daly
Okay interesting. So your thinking was based around the mainstream view of cancer but you are nonetheless thinking about what things that you could do in order to change the course of your life so as you didn’t get diagnosed again. So what sort of things were you looking at in terms of your own life choices that might help?

Mark Lintern
Um, well, just generally, um, the toxins that I was consuming, general lifestyle information to do with nutrition. So I started researching a lot about nutrition, um, better ways of eating exercise. What was the relationship with exercise and cancer? And, uh, that’s one of the biggest prevention measures you can take actually is exercise. Um, so just trying to understand what could possibly have caused it. I mean, sun exposure was probably the biggest one for me at that point. Um, I’ve been on several, uh, sun beds as well. I’ve gone through the whole process of being young and wanting to be nice and tanned. So I, I’d had some of them. So I just assumed it was radiation damage to the DNA. But again, I was trying to work out, do I have susceptible DNA genes, particular DNA genes that are more easily damaged than others. So it was just down this route of trying to work out what, what genes and establish what genes were associated with cancer, more than not, and then trying to marry them up to the, the tumor that I had.

Robin Daly
hmm yeah fair enough uh okay and um in that early research did you what what were the most useful things you think you found out the things that maybe you you feel have stood you in good stead

Mark Lintern
Well, the overriding aspect that or fundamental thing that came to the forefront was that the more research I did, the more I felt that the disease was incredibly complex. And then from that, it became apparent that scientists were still struggling to understand the link between DNA and cancer, the DNA damage or mutation and cancer, I should say. And that really astounded me that there seemed to be no particular connection that could be identified. And then from that, I started looking, I stumbled across the metabolic theory and then other theories as well. So I’ve done essentially about four months intense deep dive into the research of the somatic mutation theory. And then because it seemed so confusing, not just from my perspective, but it was apparent from this perspective of scientists studying the area that it was unbelievably confusing and complex for them. That’s when I stumbled across the metabolic theory. And I realized that, okay, there’s other perspectives, there’s other theories, I just wasn’t even aware. Nothing suggested to me by my oncologist or my doctor to look at things in a different way or consider consuming foods or diet in a different way. Or that there was even a different theory. So that initially astounded me that there was all this other information out there. And the metabolic theory has been around for a very long time. And yet, I was completely unaware of it until I’ve done a deep dive into the field. And that just sparked off my curiosity in thinking, well, you know, there’s more to this disease than the mainstream view presents.

Robin Daly
OK, so how much did this discovery of the metabolic approach change how you looked at your own situation and what you were going to do about it?

Mark Lintern
Well, I wasn’t just looking at the metabolic theories, such as I was looking at a number of them because there was the viral theory of cancer, aneuploid theory and all these other theories sparking off from really the somatic mutation theory and even getting involved in stem cells because I’ve always been interested in biology anyway, human biology. So I kind of, a new, it was a new field to me but it felt comfortable doing this sort of research. So I was looking at all sorts of things, but particularly it was diet reducing glucose, which was glucose consumption or at least processed foods and those aspects of the disease. But I think the issue for me at that point was I did do a deep dive for four months and all this information came to the fore. But after that, I’d had my second surgery and then shortly after the oncologist had confirmed that they’d removed all of the tumor. I was then put in a program to go back for checks for several years afterwards. But at that point I was, in my head, I was confirmed to be cancer free. So my research stopped. Well, I’d gained enough information to realize that I needed to change my diet. I needed to exercise more. I’d drawn that conclusion at least. And I’d stopped going down the route of investigating the somatic mutation theory in great detail because I realized how complex it was. And it wasn’t something that I could do to, shed any new light on the disease or help myself in that way because it was so complex. It was really in the realm of the very clever scientists that are already looking at that aspect of the disease. So I kind of felt confident in going forward with my life as it was and I stopped doing the research because I felt, you know, I’d been lucky. I’d got rid of the disease through this surgery. And I just developed an insight that improved my health somewhat.

Robin Daly
Right. Okay, so from the oncologist’s perspective, though, that was end of story. It was satisfactory treatment with surgery alone, so they weren’t suggesting any other kind of chemotherapy or radiotherapy or anything like that.

Mark Lintern
No.

Robin Daly
No, OK, well, OK, that’s fair enough. So you were, to some measure, able to get back to your life quite quickly, which is, as cancer goes, that’s good news. OK, but that wasn’t to be the end of the story, was it? I mean, cancer was to blight your life a second time. So would you tell us about that?

Mark Lintern
Yeah unfortunately several years later my wife’s best friend Sam who we all used to work together and we’re good friends with. She developed a swollen leg at one point and then she went to the doctors to find out the reason for this and it transpired that she had cervical cancer that had already spread to her lymph nodes. So during this time I realised that well I wanted to help in any way that I could outside of the normal scope that I mean her family of friends are absolutely fantastic, raising money, helping her emotionally and physically as they could but because I’d already done the research that I had I realised there was potentially other ways of helping her in terms of looking at potentially other treatments, diet and lifestyle that could possibly help. So I picked up the research baton again and decided to carry on doing as much research as I could. I started looking again at the metabolic theory and verse of her theories and again doing another deep dive for the time that she was diagnosed and undergoing treatment and trying to have a discourse with her and close family friends just to point out these are the aspects of the disease that were worth looking

Robin Daly
Okay, so her cancer would have been, what, stage two? Or was it three? I think it was three.

Mark Lintern
stage three.

Robin Daly
Okay so a much more serious situation than yours clearly. Yes. And so she must have had a pretty full program of treatment offered to her by the hospital.

Mark Lintern
she did she she underwent chemotherapy and the initial treatment looked very very promising and she had a large reduction of the tumor initially so always looking very positive and very good. I was skeptical at this point because I’ve done quite a lot of research on chemotherapy treatment and I was just concerned that you know that we couldn’t say we’d had a just yet that it’s very it’s quite common that the disease can begin to flourish in spite of the chemotherapy and she may need to change to various other treatments but it was a win at that point so it was very good.

Robin Daly
Right. And how was your information that you had gleaned received? Was it seen as a good addition to what was being done at the hospital or somehow in conflict with it?

Mark Lintern
Well, it was difficult because as a lot of people do these days and I was one included, you you trust the medical industry and they are there to help as best they can. You know, our doctors, oncologists and everyone there, they’re doing great work to try and look after us. But my research started to conflict with the idea that we should just trust the medical establishment or just trust what we’re being told by our oncologists. Just any mere suggestion that there is potentially something else we may be looking at that can benefit. Just seem to, I don’t know, it seemed to provide a conflict to Sam and some of her friends and family that we should just really, you know, trust in the professionals to do their job. And I can understand that Sam was in a very difficult position. And it was her life that was on the line. And she wanted the least amount of stress as possible. So I was trying to present information to do with diet and possibly look at the metabolic theory to show that there’s another aspect to the disease that needs to be considered, but I was trying to do it in a way that didn’t stress her out and allowing her to to kind of leave the questions and conversation as it were.

Robin Daly
Right. The fact that mainstream medicine won’t espouse that there is anything beyond the treatments that they offer that can actually help is a great problem, I think, for patients because it puts them in a position where they put all their eggs in one basket. They’re presented with an either-or situation, which is like, well, either you want to do proper treatment or not, you know, is how it’s presented to them and they want to have faith in their practitioner that their practitioner knows the best way to make them well. Of course, they want that. And so they’re kind of, you know, the story is like, well, do you trust me as an oncologist or not? I’m saying I’m doing all the treatment. The only things that will make any difference are what I’m doing. Everything else is a waste of time. So either you trust me or you don’t. And when you’re looking for somewhere to put your faith in, it’s not surprising. A lot of people will say, okay, I’ll just do what you say. Because emotionally, it’s extremely difficult to put yourself in sort of no man’s land in between these two opinions coming towards you. One, that the only treatment worth having is being supplied by the mainstream. And the other one just saying, well, you know, that may help you, but there are actually a lot of other things that may help you as well and could make all the difference. And it’s difficult because it kind of puts you in, say, a bit of a no man’s land, but you had to be very self-reliant and independent. And, you know, you’re not in the hands of an expert. Essentially, you’re in your own hands. So it’s not the place for everybody. And I appreciate that. And they shouldn’t have to do that. It would be so much better if the experts would say, we’re doing everything we can, but there are other things too you could do. Take a look at this and this and this. And that would be marvellous if they just would do that.

Mark Lintern
Well, it’s an incredibly difficult emotional experience to go through a cancer diagnosis. So, of course, you naturally want to put your faith in someone else to take the mantle of the stress involved in the treatment side of things so that you can focus on the holding yourself together emotionally. Last thing you want to do is be worrying about the possibility that not all treatments are being looked at. You want to have that faith just so that you can focus on your emotional well-being, if anything.

Robin Daly
Absolutely. So just interested to hear what your experience is of trying to support a dear friend who’s going through that situation and has those kind of pressures at work.

Mark Lintern
Yeah, it was I felt it was quite frustrating because. Particularly in research, I was doing kind of contradicted what was being provided to Sam. So, for instance, I’d already done some research on a drug called Avastin. And I I knew from that research that it wasn’t necessarily going to be beneficial long term for her. And then I heard that that was one of the treatment protocols she was being offered by her oncologists. And my heart sank when I heard that. But the conflict for me was. You know, I can’t it was difficult for me to relay that information to that research to a certain point in the diagnosis, so most part I had to step back and just let the oncologist do their job and accept her decision. It’s, you know, it’s obviously her life. I don’t have, you know, I’m not qualified. I don’t have any of the answers. I’m not a clinician. All I can provide is information. And I’ve got to decide whether that information is going to be stressful to her. And part of the healing process is having a positive mindset. So I wouldn’t want to talk about an issue that I believe could be detrimental because that would negatively and emotionally impact her. So it was very difficult for me. Obviously, it’s not all about me. It was it’s really very difficult for Sam and family. But from my perspective, it was difficult to be able to see certain things and then not be able to relay certain information that I knew could possibly have a positive impact and that maybe she she needs to know about. But this is the problem. There’s so much information out there and so much conflicting information and so little time to get our heads around this information that it’s difficult to know what to suggest and what not to suggest in order to do the right thing, both physically and emotionally for the patient. So it’s very nuanced. And, yeah, I did find it quite troubling. And this this did build a bit of resentment in me towards the industry because just the whole situation was a very difficult situation to navigate.

Robin Daly
I think a key point here maybe is the fact that obviously you recognise and you’ve said as much that you’re not an expert, you’re not a clinician, you’re not really in a position to advise someone on treatment and you were indeed not trying to do that. You were trying to relay information which you’d gleaned from scientific research. So you’re actually only passing on information that’s out there in the research domain, which are the results of people’s trials, what’s been found out.

Mark Lintern
And the idea was that I was, I was hoping to present this information so that Sam and family and friends would then take up the mantle of looking into it themselves. So the impetus was me to here’s the information. Go take it away and have a look for yourself to decide what you feel about it. I wasn’t trying to dictate any information to anyone. It was almost a stimulation exercise to get them to think in a different, slightly different way and consider that there is a different way of looking at things.

Robin Daly
Right so and of course it’s hard to criticize that as you’re simply looking at scientific research it’s the same data that everybody has to look at and there’s nothing to say we shouldn’t be looking at it that you shouldn’t be looking at it any more than anybody else and everybody will have to agree that even though there may be a consensus about what’s done in hospitals there’s no consensus about the science at all so it’s a perfectly reasonable situation when actually people don’t know what’s going on with cancer really for there to be discussion about it for there to be questions. Nobody has got the answers to cancer at least for mainstream medicine they just have the answers to some cancers in some people sometimes and so it’s yeah I think it’s very bad that discourse and openness about discussing things is barred basically and it’s emotionally impossible for people because of that.

Mark Lintern
So, yeah, this is the I agree, it’s the essence of scientific objectivity, isn’t it? The ability to discuss things. I don’t know that the layperson isn’t possibly thinking in a critical way in that manner. And especially, I understand that you’ve got the fear factor, it’s all emotional. So the last thing that the public want to deal with, or anyone associated with someone who’s been diagnosed is having to having to think about the extra stress of all these other aspects of the disease that need to be considered, and especially looking at scientific papers, because they’re very difficult to understand some of them. So I get why there’s pushback, I get why it’s very difficult. And most people really need to be emotionally aided through this process, even if they aren’t going through cancer themselves, because it is such a really difficult process. And Sophie Sabaj wrote a brilliant book, I think, which highlighted the emotional stress involved in that is something that really needs to be looked at for everyone involved.

Robin Daly
Yeah but she was great from the point of view that actually she wanted to deal with facts rather than sort of dogma or or things that were just passed on as hearsay. She was really good at getting to you know some actual facts to deal with and she was not one for things that would give her false hope you know they were just sort of said in order to keep her happy. She didn’t like that she wanted the actual facts and then she wanted to base her actions on the actual facts that way she felt she had the best chance of finding a way ahead which I would agree with yeah if you if you don’t really know where you are how you’re going to find your way forward. So yeah that seemed very pragmatic but it’s not for everyone a lot of people would rather be not told where they are really and just be feel they’re in good hands of being held which is fair enough there’s not you can’t criticise anybody for that you can’t say anybody shouldn’t do that it’s certainly not my way of doing things but that’s what some people want. So what happened in the end?

Mark Lintern
Okay, unfortunately, just after a year, Sam passed away, the cancer came back after the chemotherapy treatment and Avastin treatment and most of the treatment she had and it became resistant to the treatment essentially. And unfortunately, she was in a lot of pain and unfortunately passed away shortly after the end of the year.

Robin Daly
Hmm. So where did this leave you at that point?

Mark Lintern
I was very angry, I will admit, not only just because I’ve lost a friend, but because I felt that more could have been done, that there was a different way of looking potentially or other aspects of the disease that could be integrated into standard of care treatments. So yeah, it was very difficult for me at that stage, very emotional.

Robin Daly
Well that’s very similar to myself of course I was in the exact same position losing my daughter and I realized at that point actually there’s a lot of things outside of standard of care that can be helpful and none of those are on the table and you know you can slip them in there maybe if you’re lucky if you can afford it and if you keep quiet about it and don’t tell the oncologist all this kind of thing and it was yeah it was very wrong from my point of view everybody should be given the very best chance and the science is all there now to show that the kind of things that we were doing with Briney 20 years ago where it made complete sense you know all the things to do with nutrition and lifestyle and everything else today they all have a major impact on your progress and success of treatment so yeah that should be on offer to everybody and I was similarly angry about it at the time and so I set off on the journey that I’m on which is setting up yes to life and and helping people to access all those resources outside of conventional medicine and also working hard to try and open conventional medicine to the ideas that they should be embracing these this way of thinking as well so I was still on the journey but plenty of distance to go but you know we have had movement so that kind of initial anger where it may seem like a not helpful response that you know anger is not usually cracked up as a great thing it actually gave me the momentum to do a lot and it sounds like it gave you the same thing

Mark Lintern
Yeah, that was the pivotal moment for me really, to carry on the research, because I was just, just to give a quick example of the type of thing that made me angry was, I mean, there’s abundant evidence to show that fasting can have a beneficial effect, particularly with improving the effectiveness of chemotherapy. So just that alone, helping the effectiveness of standard care treatments, why I couldn’t understand why this wasn’t even considered or wasn’t being looked at. So it’s just something as simple as that. And I was trying to convey this message, but because oncologists weren’t presenting this idea or this form of additional process to do with chemotherapy, Sam, unfortunately, she wasn’t going to take it on board. And that’s one of the many things, one of the many small things that just frustrated me and angered me in the end, because it seems like such a simple addition to the treatment that can be added that may have made a much more positive difference in the end. So from that, because of that anger, and yes, it’s not really good to be angry about things, but it did motivate me to carry on doing the research I’d already done, which I’d now performed like the first four months of my initial diagnosis, and then a year long deep dive into the evidence. I thought, well, you know, I’m not going to let Sam die in vain. And I want to carry this forward and just document my findings and try and make sense of this disease. Because at this point, it had taken quite a lot of my life within that year. My wife was obviously distraught and Sam’s friends and family were distraught. So it was a very emotional time. And I thought I’ve done so much work, I would like to carry this forward. And that was the motivation really, to push me to carry on writing the book that I inevitably wrote.

Robin Daly
Right. Okay. Just to go back on what you were just saying, I mean, I think it’s interesting to note that, you know, if you look at the science behind a lot of integrative approaches and what they can do with conventional treatment, exercise, diet, as you say, you know, looking after the microbiome, you know, simple things like mushrooms to actually support your immune system through these devastating treatments like chemotherapy, the fact that there’s absolutely zero interest in any of these by mainstream medicine to people who know the facts, who know the science behind it, and they know what a massive difference these things can make to someone’s experience of going through treatment and the success of them. It seems utterly callous the way that oncologists are behaving. And but I want to stress that the oncologists themselves, they don’t believe they’re being callous. There’s no doubt about it. They think they’re actually protecting the interests of patients in what they’re doing. I think they’re utterly deluded and they should be proper scientists and look at the science. But I also feel that they’re not, they don’t sincerely believe they’re doing the best thing. But I would ask them to wake up to the science and just read it for once. It’s not like instead of just saying, oh, it’s all unproven, actually take a look and see whether there is good science behind these things because there is. So just the point I wanted to get in there that, you know, it’s not, it’s not intention to harm or, you know, it’s not coming from the wrong place, but these people are just simply unwilling to look outside the box. And they’ve got reasons for that. The reasons are not good ones that are persuading them never to look outside the box. They’re subject to a lot of intense pressure from their peers and from other sources to keep their eyes focused inside the box. But nonetheless, I’d encourage them to have some courage, look outside the box and find out what’s out there for the sake of their patients. Not for anything else, but simply because they care about their patients. Anyway, rant over. Can we come back to your story now? So there you are. You set out on another journey, you decided you’re going to keep going. Well, what was your aim when you said you were going to keep going?

Mark Lintern
My initial aim was I was now worried that what would happen if a family member of mine or a friend of mine got cancer. With this new information that I had that could possibly help with standard of care treatments, I wanted to document that just so that if someone I loved did get the disease, I could then provide them with that information with it sourced with the science associated with it, the evidence to show benefit, that it would convince them to consider these other modalities to assist them with their standard of care treatment. So the whole idea was to try and improve the possibility of not going through the same process that we’d had with SAM to improve the people’s outcomes.

Robin Daly
Okay, so off you went. So where do you direct your research initially? What were you actually looking at?

Mark Lintern
It was a broad spectrum, to be honest. So it was everything to do with the type of treatments that are available and the alternative treatments. I did go down a little bit of a rabbit hole looking at alternative treatments such as cannabis and various other treatments, probably considered not standard of care and with no evidence. But I came out of that rabbit hole and I just tried to focus on where the evidence lies, basically. And it just progressed from looking deeply at the metabolic theory and nutrition and health in general. But then I wasn’t satisfied with just finding treatments that would benefit. I was noticing that there was a lot of information regarding nutrition and certain compounds such as turmeric, garlic, all these natural compounds, honey, even, how they were benefiting cancer patients. I know these are anecdotal, but there’s a lot of them out there. And it was obviously they were having a beneficial effect, but no one could really explain why. And that further fed my curiosity. I wanted to know why these particular treatments, why sulforaphane in broccoli was beneficial. And that just carried on the research to delve deeper and try and understand the mechanism. So this is where I was getting more into trying to understand the metabolic theory and then I’m trying to understand the mechanism as to why viruses and bacteria were causing cancer. And then that transpired into those particular viruses and bacteria were damaging DNA and it all flowed on from there. I was like, well, if the DNA theory potentially has many issues, then maybe it’s not DNA causing the disease. And then I hit on this notion of, OK, so we seem to have a lot of theories that talk about malfunction, how the cell goes wrong. It doesn’t seem to matter what causes that damage. So it could be an infection or it could be a carcinogen, it could be sunlight. But whatever happens, the cell goes wrong. And within my research, this didn’t seem to start making sense to me. So I started I started realizing, well, OK, there’s a particular consistency to the disease that seems to occur. And this was after I discovered the hallmarks of cancer. Now, the reason why I discovered the hallmarks of cancer was because I was I was just really interested in the details of the metabolic theory. So I contacted Thomas Seifried, Professor Thomas Seifried in Boston, and he surprisingly responded to me and suggested that the only way to really explain the disease in any particular formal way, it would be to use the hallmarks of cancer. And he explained that the metabolic theory explains most of them, if not all of them. And I thought, wow, this is this is an interesting way of looking at the disease through this consistent aspect. And it was just a process of looking at all sorts of aspects of the disease immunology as well that made me realize that there seems to be something that doesn’t connect. There’s this idea idea that randomness through multifactorial triggers and then randomness of damage, DNA damage can cause the consistency of the disease. And that became a real big sticking point for me.

Mark Lintern
From a problem solving perspective, I was something doesn’t make sense here. So at some point, I sat down, literally sat down and I have had a word with myself where I thought, OK, clearly the somatic mutation theory and the DNA aspect of the disease is incredibly complex, and that’s nothing I can help with. Now, we treatments don’t seem to progress to the extent that we’re making that much of an impact on cancer. Unfortunately, we’ve had a lot of money thrown at the problem. So I thought, well, there can be any really two reasons for that. Oh, this is why I concluded. And the first reason is that just maybe DNA genetics of cancer are far too complex for us to understand at the moment. We don’t have the technology to understand it and that maybe the somatic mutation theory is correct, but we just need more time. We need to improve technology because it’s so unbelievably complex. And that’s only something that scientists really can deal with. That’s not something I could deal with. So that’s one potentiality. The reason why treatments aren’t working as well as we hope they would be. The other potentiality is that just maybe the somatic mutation theory was wrong. This idea that random damage can cause consistency is wrong. And that’s what I got on board with. I couldn’t help with the first aspect because that’s scientist domain but I could possibly help with trying to work out if there’s another aspect to the disease by going through the literature in the way that I did from looking at a problem-solving perspective with the fact that randomness doesn’t cause consistency. So that then sparked a kind of a light bulb moment in me that there was value in me going down this route of then continuing to expand my horizons and absorb as much information as I can from all sorts of disciplines in order to try and find some sort of link. That was the first moment really where I thought okay it’s possible to look at another view of the disease as opposed to the standard view of cancer is caused by cell damage and this randomness causes consistency. It didn’t feel like anyone was really explaining the consistency of the disease apart from Professor Thomas Seyfried who I later discovered was trying to highlight this by suggesting that damaged or defective oxfoss was the consistent aspect that could explain the hallmarks in despite the multifactorial triggers that could give rise to this damage to mitochondria but it was a specific type of damage consistent with mitochondria that could explain the consistency of the disease. So that whole process of trying to marry randomness with consistency and realizing that there was this possibility that the somatic mutation theory was could be incorrect and entertaining that idea that I don’t think many do entertain that idea that led me or gave me the impetus to further my research and carry on.

Robin Daly
Great. All right. Well, look, a couple of things in what you said. I mean, the first thing is interesting to have. I think lots of people have done what you did at the beginning, which you get out there looking at all the things that are actually treatments and why they might work and how they might help and all the rest of it and what science is behind them. Lots of people have done those in order to find resources to help their own condition. But interesting enough, you obviously went beyond that to get into actually looking at the mechanism of cancer itself, which very few people in lay position ever do that I’ve heard of. So a very unusual situation. Also, I just wanted to revisit what you were saying about the hallmarks of cancer, because not everybody’s familiar with these hallmarks. I thought it’d be good to just talk about them for a minute so people have an understanding of what we’re discussing. I think the things to recognize is that these hallmarks are kind of universally recognized. Nobody’s arguing about the hallmarks of cancer, whether they’re right or wrong. Or, you know, it’s not a theory. It’s just actually an observation of the behaviours of cancer. And there are kind of 10 in the mainstream group at the moment. And there’s four contenders waiting to be added to the list. But it started off, I think, at about six or seven and then it’s grown to ten. And those hallmarks of cancer, they’re quite a new idea. They’ve only been around since about the turn of the century, I think. But they gained this enormous recognition and they’re very useful to pharmaceutical companies because they actually, when you list the behaviours of cancer like this, you give them a list of targets for their drugs, basically. And so they love those. But nonetheless, they’re useful things in as much as they single out, well, what are the unique things that cancer does? And you’re saying that Professor Seyfried pointed you to the fact, well, if you have a good theory, it ought to be able to explain why these behaviours happen. And if it can’t, then, well, either there’s something still to be learnt or the theory’s got a big hole in it. Yeah, so you were saying that Seyfried himself was looking to be able to explain all ten of these hallmarks through the work he was doing.

Mark Lintern
Yeah, so I suppose what he was trying to point out to me was that cancer has a consistency and these 10 hallmarks at the moment, and obviously there may be more, they’re shared by all solid tumors at least, or all solid cancers. So there is a consistency there that in order to diagnose a particular disease, a disease’s cancer, they have to have these particular hallmarks or show these particular hallmarks. So this is the consistency of the disease. So for instance, one of them would be cell death failure. Obviously a tumor can’t grow if the cell is able to commit cell death, which is a programmed process that cells undertake when they’re damaged. But with the process of cancer cells, this programmed cell death mechanism seems to have failed. And that then allows the cell to stay, whether it will be passive or senescent, as they call it, where it doesn’t do anything. But then one of the other hallmarks is uncontrolled growth or failure of growth signals. So normally you have a process where cells will control their growth. They’ll only grow when they need to. Now this growth signaling has failed to the extent that when you have a failure of cell death, which is essentially Hallmark 3, and then you have a failure of the cell to regulate its growth, and it becomes uncontrolled growth, then you have the development of a tumor, an excessive growth of a cellular mass. So for cancer, to be determined as cancer, it has to have or show these particular hallmarks. And there’s 10 of them.

Robin Daly
Okay, that’s great. So we’re going to finish it there for today. We’re going to pick this up again in our next chat and move on from there to what you found out. So fantastic. Thank you very much for giving us the ground from which you started. They’re all very important, I think, the impetus for your work and enormous efforts that you put into this. But yeah, we’ll go on to actually what you came to discover in the next chat. So thanks very much, Mark.

Mark Lintern
OK, thank you very much. Lovely to speak to you.

Robin Daly
Well I hope that’s piqued your interest and that you won’t want to miss the next episode of the show when Mark will begin to explain the detail of where his investigations led him and what surprising discoveries he was to stumble over. Please do join me for the next chapter in Mark’s story next week here on the Yes to Life show.