A character in a book I’m reading offhandedly remarked that we all have had thousands of cancers. Most of the time our bodies manage to get rid of them. We’re only bothered by the occasional and tragic case where one of them grows out of control.
Is it true? Are all of us fighting off cancers left and right?
What is the name of the book and who is the character? Fiction or non-fiction? It sounds to me that the character is trying to make cancer out to be some sort of virus that you can catch, which is definitely not the case.
first off, you can catch a virus which could give you cancer. look into retroviruses (esp Kaposi and his sarcoma).
second, Neptune, i believe the author is correct, except in calling them cancer. like, if it’s simply one renegade cell which is destroyed by the immune system (as i am led to believe, by what i’ve read on tumor and cancer developemnt, happens) you can hardly call that cancer. if i had one mutant sickle-cell RBC, you would hardly call that sickle-cell anemia, right?
likewise, cells go beserk all the time, and are phaged. it’s only a cancer if the renegade cell, through (what i have been led to surmise is a type of darwinism) said cell turning cancerous and not getting eaten (phaged) by another cell, reproduces and reproduces by the pissload.
jb
Cancer is essentially uncontrolled cell proliferations. A cell mutates, through outside influence or because of inborn programming or a combination of the two, and starts to divide endlessly and that’s pretty much cancer. Cells in the human body are damaged in some way every day and sometimes this damage can lead to the preceding scenario. But the body also has many repair mechanisms in place to either remove the aberrant cells or undo the damage. However if the rate of damage outstrips the ability to repair then presto, you can get cancer.
For instance, exposure to UV light from the sun does damage the DNA of skin cells in someone every day. But the body has enzymes called polymerases that can repair the DNA by snipping out the bad section and replacing it. However, if you expose unprotected skins cells (i.e. no clothing or sunscreen) to a large amount of sunlight over a period of time the damage done to the cellular DNA outstrips the bodys ability to repair it and there you go- skin cancer.
So, very basically, what the character said is true although he left out a whole lot of details.
And I can’t recall the specifics just now, but some cancers do appear to be triggered by such agents as the Epstein-Barr, among others.
So it seems that it just depends on your definition of cancer.
These aberrant cells - shall we call them “potential cancers” - are an everyday phenomenon, and most of them are taken out by the immunity system. When they aren’t, then you call it “cancer”.
By the way, the fictional character is from All Families are Psychotic - A Novel by Douglas Coupland.
If you do post-mortem studies, you would find most men of a certain age have prostate cancer cells and most people have follicular thyroid cancer cells. But I don’t know if a ten year old would have thousands of cancers at any given time. I don’t know if anyone does.