How come we can find cures for up-and-coming diseases in usually less than ten years, but cancer has existed for so long and there still isn’t a reliable cure?
In: Biology
Technically cancer is pretty different from other diseases as it comes from within the body and isn’t just some virus coming from atmosphere. Our body constantly produces new cells which interact with each other, perform some predefined functions, consume elements from outer world (whatever you breath, eat, drink and so on) to live and reproduce.
Cancer happens when any type of cells for some reason mutates (randomly changes its structure) and stops fulfilling its purpose while still technically being alive and somewhat included in the system. This most often happens because it got some weird element and developed in wrong way. If the organism fails to quickly detect and kill such cells, they start reproducing, but also unpredictably. Congratulations, there’s cancer.
It’s just a big collection of bad cells, which take energy from good cells, uncontrollably reproduce, taking even more energy, and start just physically pushing everything else near them, breaking the normal working flow of organs. That’s why it’s dangerous and why it can be undetected for a very long time – you won’t notice it until cancer cells start physically interfering with half of your body processes. And since they are still cells, it’s incredibly difficult to kill only bad cells, not damaging all the good ones.
Chemotherapy does exactly this, it’s basically a compromise between trying to kill as much cancer cells as possible while trying to not kill everything else in the process. Physical operations remove the big cancer tumors, but it’s still impossible to identify and remove every single cancer cell, and most of them are still able to reproduce. That’s why right now it’s almost impossible to fully get rid of cancer. However, if the technology reaches the level where we can perform full body scans with getting status of every single cell and killing them one by one, it’ll probably stop being an issue.
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