In Pierre Boulle’s original novel “Planet of the Apes”, an ancestral memory recovered from one of the animalistic humans is that of a medical researcher who was giving test apes a carcinogenic injection. Jabbed with his own syringe, the researcher now considers himself doomed; he WILL get cancer. Is that a fiction on Boulle’s part or is there really such a substance used in medical research?
I doubt that anything is 100% (you might get hit by a bus before getting cancer).
But, ingesting alpha emitters (like PU-239) is very likely to give you cancer in the long term.
There are also transmissible cancers that affect a few animals, and maybe in this future, one was discovered or designed that affected Primates.
“Long term” is the key factor. An oncologist once told me “everyone will get cancer, if they live long enough”. So inject yourself with water, wait 100 years, and if you don’t die of something else, you will almost certainly have cancer. If you limit the queston to, say, “what will give you cancer within a year” or something like that, that’s a different question.
ISTM if you try to come up with something with a near-unity likelihood of inducing cancer, it has to give you cancer very quickly so you don’t have a chance to die of something else first. And most things that can give you cancer very quickly tend to make you very sick - sick enough to die - by other means as well.
Radiation is a fine example: give a million people a big enough dose, and most of them will die of cancer eventually - but some will get hit by a bus, and some will die of alcoholism, and some will die from preexisting genetic diseases, or domestic violence, or…any of an infinite variety of causes. Turn up the dosage, and you’ll increase the cancers and reduce deaths by other causes…but you’ll increase the deaths by acute radiation syndrome.
Sodium nitrite is another example. It increases your cancer risk, but its outright toxicity will kill you sooner if you try to increase the dosage to the point where it gives everyone cancer.
IIRC, that’s what the novel postulated: the cancer developing within months. I’d quote the passage exactly but no online sources are available, not even my local library’s e-books.
The woman broke off again and a male voice took over:
“I had found, I believe, a cure for cancer. I wanted to put it to the test,
like all my previous discoveries. I was careful, but not careful enough. For
some time the apes have been reluctant to lend themselves to these
experiments. Before going into Georges’, the chimpanzee’s, cage I had him
held down by my two assistants. I got ready to give him the injection—the
cancer-producing one. I had to give it to him in order to be able to cure him.
Georges looked resigned. He did not move, but I saw his crafty eyes glance
over my shoulder. I realized too late. The gorillas, the six gorillas I was
holding in reserve for the infection, had escaped. A plot. They seized us.
Georges directed the operation. He copied my movements exactly. He
ordered us to be tied down on the table, and the gorillas promptly obeyed
him. Then he picked up the hypodermic and injected all three of us with the
deadly liquid. So now I have cancer. It’s certain, for though there may be
doubt as to the efficacy of the cure, the fatal serum has long since been
tested and proved effective.
Page 147
Thank you! And to continue the quote:
“After emptying the hypodermic, Georges gave me a friendly pat on the
cheek, as I often did to my apes. I had always treated them well. From me
they received more caresses than blows. A few days later, in the cage in
which they had locked me up, I recognized the first symptoms of the
disease. So had Georges, and I heard him tell the others that he was going to
begin the cure. This gave me a new fright. What if it killed me off more
quickly! I know I am condemned, but now I lack confidence in this new
cure. During the night I succeeded in forcing the bars of my cage and
escaping. I have taken refuge in the camp outside the town. I have two
months to live. I am spending them playing patience and dozing.”
Now that my memory is refreshed I’m pretty certain Boulle made it up; that would be an incredibly fast case of cancer.
You’d have to seriously derange cellular reproduction in a big hurry, but limit it to only one sort of tissue. A tall order.
When do give animals (mice) cancer with near 100% efficiency with what are called Xenographs. Basically you start with a mouse that has been genetically engineered to have no immune system. Then you can implant or inject it with human cancer cells and wait for the cancer to grow, at which point you can try various methods to treat it.
But that injection wouldn’t give the normal human cancer as the cells would be reconized as foreign and killed by their immune system long before they multiplied enough to cause a problem. If you wanted to give a human cancer the (nearly) sure fire way to do so would be to extract some of their cells, modify them with CRISPR to make the malignant and then inject them back into that individual. But that is going to be an awful lot of work.
I’m curious about the concept that two humans could hold down a chimpanzee. As I understand it, that would be risky. Plus, if holding a human by the arms, the most he can do is kick with a limited effective range. I wonder what a chimp can do with his feet free…
As I understand, radiation is not much different from cooking (hence, radiation preserved meat - destroy the functionality of bacteria) it breaks organic molecules. Just, much deeper and more randomly than heat. Break too many organic molecules, the cells stop functioning. Lesser radiation will break organic chemicals, and the danger is they break genetic material badly enough that it becomes cancerous in reproducing but not so bad it kills celll function.
Cancer causing radiation involves damage to DNA. As does a lot of acute radiation damage.
When cells are dividing the DNA is unraveled, and subject to oxidative damage. Lots of ionisation radiation hammering into your body leads to lots of ionised radicals just ready to damage stuff. Fast dividing cell lines, such as gut lining, blood cell production, skin, get the worst of this as more cells are vulnerable and any time.
Acute radiation poisoning leads to much cell death in these lines, hence the typical symptoms. But any cell can sustain damage. Just with different likelihood.
The damage to DNA will do anything from nothing at all, to disabling a core function.
Apoptosis In the face of damage is what you want. But a cell with damage that doesn’t take itself out is a potential cancer progenitor.
Short answer is that it is the ionising nature of such radiation that causes the danger, hence why the term “ionising radiation” is used. This gets us back to such idiocy as mobile phones causing cancer. They do not involve ionising radiation. There is no mechanism for them to damage DNA. (I always wanted to ask one of the anti mobile phone loonies if they were afraid of bicycle wheels, since the spokes radiated.)
Ingesting a radioactive source is thus really bad. Our skin will stop alpha particles and low energy beta radiation (aka electrons) but once inside your body things are not going to be good.
I have heard it opined that inhaling even a tiny spec of plutonium is pretty much a 100% cancer. Although it may take some time.
It’s not a carcinogen, but for the purposes of an injection causing cancer, note that there are communicable cancers.
For example, dogs can get Canine transmissible venereal tumour from contact with another dog with that condition. An injection of cells from one of those tumors would have a basically 100% chance of causing cancer in dogs.
Probably such a thing could be engineered for humans. The hela cell line is pretty hardy.
I’ve heard that too, but the evidence does not support it. From Wikipedia:
The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that the lifetime cancer risk from inhaling 5,000 plutonium particles, each about 3 μm wide, is 1% over the background U.S. average. Ingestion or inhalation of large amounts may cause acute radiation poisoning and possibly death. However, no human being is known to have died because of inhaling or ingesting plutonium, and many people have measurable amounts of plutonium in their bodies.
1% increase in risk after inhaling 5000 particles is quite a bit lower than 100% after inhaling one particle.
Especially if the 2 percentages have different bases as background radiation and the chances to die
;o)