What is Cancer?

nddons said:
Add depressing too.
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Shouldn't be. Your cells are all in the world's best incubator for the better part of a century. They are held at exactly the right temperature and bathed in nutrients. Yet if you get cancer (not everyone does) it will likely be in your old age, and you have to die of something. Nothing terribly depressing about that.
 
steingar said:
Shouldn't be. Your cells are all in the world's best incubator for the better part of a century. They are held at exactly the right temperature and bathed in nutrients. Yet if you get cancer (not everyone does) it will likely be in your old age, and you have to die of something. Nothing terribly depressing about that.
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Dad died of colon cancer at 73.

Mother in law died of pancreatic cancer at 50. That's an ugly way to go.

I had my own scare at 51. All is good now.

Cancer sucks.
 
LDJones said:
Unless allowing for the introduction of such serves a higher purpose than just the longevity of specific examples of the specie. As stated earlier, we don't know what we don't know.
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And if we don't know, we should just say that and not substitute some purpose. Doing so means that we are pretending to know.


BTW for Steinger or other biologist here. Do the loss of telomeres in the DNA from repeated replications result in higher chances for a cancer to appear?
 
Cancer sucks and to comment further in an effort to express how I really feel about it would violate the rules here.
 
ScottM said:
And if we don't know, we should just say that and not substitute some purpose. Doing so means that we are pretending to know.


BTW for Steinger or other biologist here. Do the loss of telomeres in the DNA from repeated replications result in higher chances for a cancer to appear?
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While it can in laboratory mice deprived of the enzyme that makes telomeres (cleverly named by biologists telomerase. Hey, we're trained to find stuff out) our telomeres normally don't reach sufficiently diminutive length to cause genomic instability.

That said, just about every cancer cell has to activate the gene that encodes telomerase (it is normally inactive in humans).
 
flyingron said:
Actually, I beg to differ with Henning on this. Cancer is NOT an immune disorder. Cancer is a mutation of cell genetics that ends up with two major factors: abnormally fast/invasive growth and the ability to self sustain itself (causes your other tissues to feed it with blood flow, etc..).

Eating other tissue also isn't indicative of cancer. Usually it crowds out the normal cells. In some cases there are chemicals secreted by the cancerous cells that do interfere with other normal cell physiology.

Within the large definition of cancers there are hundreds of different subdivisions based on just what kind of mutation has happened, where it happened, how it's spreading, ...
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+1 (agreed)
 
oldShar said:
flyingron said:
Actually, I beg to differ with Henning on this. Cancer is NOT an immune disorder. Cancer is a mutation of cell genetics that ends up with two major factors: abnormally fast/invasive growth and the ability to self sustain itself (causes your other tissues to feed it with blood flow, etc..).
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+1 (agreed)
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The immune system does play a role in cancer in the sense that a number of cancers are caused by viruses. If for one reason or another, the part of the immune system that controls viruses is disabled, those cancers tend to appear.

The idea that cancer is 'a disease of the immune system' is mostly the result of vitamin pushers who use the cancer scare to peddle their products.
 
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