If cancer is a complex society, we can fight it using methods of cyberwar (Image: Jonathan Bloom)
Eshel Ben-Jacob is taking cues from the collective intelligence of bacteria to learn how to interrupt communication between cancer cells. The physicist tells Madhumita Venkataramanan how this strategy could even turn the disease against itself
As a physicist, why are you studying cancer?
I study pattern formation in natural systems and have been promoting the idea of bacterial collective intelligence for three decades now. That began because, philosophically, I wanted to find the special difference between a non-living particle and a single-celled…
