How cancer starts in the body?
In: Biology
A cell mutates. Doesn’t do what it is supposed to do. This could result in the cell dying, or being unable to reproduce. If it does survive and reproduce, its children will also not do what they are supposed to do.
After several generations, you have a lump of tissue that is hogging resources, but not doing its job. This is cancer.
Also why there is not a cure yet. The mutation could be one of millions of different things that causes the cell to not function how it should.
I think are a couple of good explanation videos on Youtube, as this is a very common question.
Imagine a toy factory. The factory has machines responsible for producing a bunch of toys and throughout the process a bunch of fancy sensors in the machines scan each of the toys that it makes to make sure the toys come out correctly and if it doesnt it gets destroyed. Cancer is like if one of the sensors broke and the machine started making a bunch of messed up toys. Because the sensor broke theres no way for the factory to destroy the messed up toys so a bunch of messed up toys are made instead of good ones.
Your body is the factory and the machines are the cells. Cells have cycles of reproduction and scheduled death. When one of the cells are messed up it can replicate itself uncontrollably and not kill itself like its supposed to. Now you have one messed up cell replicating into 2 and those 2 messed up cells turn into 4 and so on. Thats cancer in a way i hope a 5yo can understand.
I probably got the analogy a little messed up bc its been a while since i learned this in AP Bio lolz
Cancer is a human cell which has gone “wrong” normally this is detected by the cell and it either commits suicide or is eliminated by the body, but sometimes the cell continues and then due to the error in the cell will rapidly grow and multiply and you then have cancer.
A cell has a programming on how to divide. Sometimes, this programming goes bad. This happens a lot in the body, and there are other cells in the body that take those cells with bad peogramming out.
Sometimes, the body doesn’t recognise those cells. Then, they keep dividing and form clumps (tumors). When the cells stick together in a ball, its mostly good news, but when the cells start travelling trough the body, it’s harder to find and they will start this bad programming on other places as well, this is bad.
A slightly different perspective is to imagine cancer from an evolutionary point of view.
Single-celled life began really soon after liquid water appeared on Earth, perhaps only a few 100 million years. It stayed single-cell for the next THREE BILLION YEARS, and only went multicellular about 600 million years ago.
Why did it take so long (really, it was amazingly long, 5x longer than the whole history of all multicellular life!) for the first complex organisms to appear?
In single-celled organisms, it’s every cell for itself. But in a multicellular creature, each cell has to be prepared to die for the health of the whole animal. It’s prepared to die because it knows that every other cell in the creature has the same DNA, so personal death doesn’t matter.
This “multicellular contract” has a range of biological mechanisms underpinning it. These mechanisms look for cells that are not quite right, perhaps because of a DNA change due to a random mutation, and quickly kills them. You can imagine every cell in your body having a large red button on its back with “KILL ME NOW” written on it. Patrol cells wander around your body looking for suspicious behaviour, and if they see a cell acting out, they’ll push that button.
This is why multicellular life took so long to appear — these mechanisms are the exact opposite of what single-celled creatures are trying to do: multiply as rapidly as possible and hang the consequences.
We humans have around 7 separate mechanisms like this, all aiming to exterminate cells which go rogue. When, without being detected, a cell accumulates enough mutations to let it evade all 7 regulation mechanisms, it can go crazy, reproduce like mad, and our bodies can’t stop it. The multicellular contract collapses, 3 billion years of evolution unwind, and your cells start acting like unicellular organisms again. This is cancer.
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