Let’s say someone is a cigarette smoker. Each time they light a cigarette, are they chancing the fact that it could contain the carcinogen that will start the cancer that will be an issue for them years later, or is it a gradual build up of carcinogens in the body eventually causing lung cancer? Like, could the hypothetical hot dog I’m eating right now be responsible for cancer years down the line?
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At each point of cell devision a cell performs checks to ensure that all the DNA is still good and the cell is still capable of performing this function. If it fails these checks then the cell undergoes apoptosis or cell death.
However if those checks fail then the unhealthy cell reproduces and passes down its damaged mutations. If that mutation causes the signal to reproduce to remain on then you have a cancerous cell. (This is not ALWAYS a error in the go signal, some cells reproduce in response to deficiencies or injuries so sometimes it is an error in detecting these situations.)
Carcinogen is just a generic term for “any mutagen that can cause cancer-causing mutations.” And just because you have a cell with the cancer-causing mutation does not mean you will get cancer. Your body has specialized immune cells designed to hunt and kill cells that are not functioning correctly either due to mutations or viral infections and they tend to find cancer cells pretty quickly before they can reproduce, it is only when those cells reproduce to the point where the natural killer cells cannot remove them faster than they reproduce that tumors form.
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