Why haven’t scientists worked it out yet?
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Getting rid of cancer is easy. The hard part is getting rid of cancer without also killing the rest of the patient.
The problem is that “Cancer” is not s single thing, it is sort of all sorts of things that can wrong in a body that have similar results.
Cancer is when the normal way a cell in your body reproduces itself goes wrong. The DNA blueprint that your cells use to build stuff including themselves gets damaged and they process of making new cells goes wrong somehow.
Our immune system is pretty good at dealing with cells that go wrong.
However you are made up out of so many cells and they divided so often that even a tiny fraction of cases that go wrong in just the right way and don’t get caught may spell trouble.
The chances of any individual cell to become a cancer is extremely low, but if you buy enough lottery tickets for long enough you eventually win a jackpot.
Evolution has set you up that your chances of dying of cancer at a young age under normal conditions are very low. However not as much effort was invested in keeping that going at old age. The cost benefit wasn’t there for natural selection to do its thing.
As you grow older your chances of getting cancer grow higher and if you get old enough you are likely to die with cancer growing in you even if you don’t die of cancer.
Getting rid of cancer, when your immune system doesn’t can be difficult.
If you catch it early enough you can cut it out or off, kill it with poison or with radiation or otherwise destroy.
You kill cancer cells the same way you would kill healthy cells.
This is obviously not ideal.
There are parts of the human body that you can’t easily cut out of off and poisoning and irradiating the boy in the hopes that the cancer cells will die before the rest of the patient does is difficult at best.
We have some tricks that we use to target the poison or radiation so it gets to the cancerous parts more than anywhere else, but you are still doing quite some damage to the rest of the body.
Still with a little luck you kill the cancer and leave enough of the rest of patient alive to recover.
However there is another part. Once a cancer has grown enough, bits of it might come loose and wander into other parts of your body to grow there.
If you don’t find the cancer in time, notice it too late, don’t kill all of it when you have the chance etc, you have not just one cancer you have a body full of cancer.
At that point things are usually very grim.
This is why noticing and killing the cancer as soon as possible is so important.
If its found to late it may be too late for the patient.
On the other hand a lot of “not yet cancer” never develops into full blown cancer and you will find a lot of that if you look for it and may unnecessarily cut or kill parts of the body that might never have become a problem.
Finding the right balance is hard and likely to get people killed either way.
So we can’t prevent cancer because there are so many ways cells can go wrong.
We can’t find and kille all cancers in time before they spread either and our ways of killing cancer without killing the person around it are less than perfect.
However we are making progress on all fronts.
We have found a lot of things that make you more likely to get cancer and tried to get rid of them, though health and safety regulations.
We have even found things like a vaccine against virus that made people more likely to get a certain type of cancer.
So we know how to reduce chances of getting cancer.
We have also gotten much better at diagnosing cancer early enough and at killing it when we discover it.
A number of cancer diagnoses that would have been a death sentence a generation ago are now quite a bit more survivable under the same circumstances.
That leaves still a lot of people dying of cancer.
However progress is continues to be made.
One promising avenue is based on the same tech that gave us the COVID vaccine. We use it to train the immune system to kill cancer cells. If someone is found to have cancer we take samples of it and make your own immune system better at killing the cancer cells.
This is in early stages, but it is progress.
We might never completely get rid of cancer, but we can make sure that fewer people die of it.
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