if cancer is basically a clump of cells that dont want to die, why/how do things like cigarettes, asbestos, and the literal sun trigger it?
In: Biology
Let me try and really ELI5 this.
Let’s pretend a group of friends is building a neighborhood of houses. Each friend has got a huge book of instructions that tell them everything they need to know about building the houses, and how each of them should fit into the neighborhood. This book even tells them how many new friends you need to invite, and when.
The friends want to keep this neighborhood absolutely brand spanking new, so new in fact, that they demolish houses once they get old, and build new ones to make up for these old ones. The big book of instructions also explains how to do this so there’s always have the correct number of houses.
Each friend is responsible for building just one house, and then they live in it. Also, each friend gets their own big book of instructions. When the house is removed because it got old, and the friend is going to leave the neighborhood with their book, the book instructs them to invite a new friend to the neighborhood to build a house. The old friend is gong to keep his copy of the book, and so copies the book by hand, to give to the new friend.
cigarettes, asbestos, and the sun are like smudges and coffee stains in the big book of instructions. Often the friend can work out what the words or letters should be, and correctly copy them. But over time the errors slowly build up.
Eventually the book can become so incorrect that the friend reading it thinks it says, “Invite a new friend to build a house next to you, then DON’T remove you’re own house”. The DON’T is the error that has arrived over time.
So now not only do we have 2 houses where we should only have one, we’ve got 2 friends with a bad copy of the book! Both these friends will now invite 2 more friends, and not remove themselves. So now we’ve got 4 houses where there should only be one, and 4 friends with bad book copies! And so on.
These friends are now really stressed. They’ve got houses built all over each other, and this stress is causing them to copy the book badly. They’re making more mistakes than they normally would. The books are now telling them to invite a new friend every day. To build lots of roads to allow all these new friends to reach them. To order in takeaways constantly to feed all these friends. To tell the friend from the other side of town who’s come to help the situation, to get lost.
So now in the north-west corner of the neighborhood we’ve got a clump of houses and friends that aren’t doing what they are supposed to be doing. And this clump is growing rapidly.
Although dangerous, this clump of houses isn’t enough to destroy the neighborhood. However, if one of those friends living in the clump gets an error in his book that tells him to get in his car, and drive to a new area of the neighborhood, and how to avoid the friends trying to help on the way, we’ve got a big problem.
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