if our skin cells are constantly dying and being replaced by new ones, how can a bad sunburn turn into cancer YEARS down the line?
In: 3306
Picture your skin as being made up of tons of little sheets of paper. When they get damaged and/or fall off, those gaps are filled by copying other pieces of paper until you have enough sheets to fill it in. Normally you only need a few copies at a time. When you get burned you have an immediate problem that leads to the later problem.
The immediate problem is that you need a lot of copies at once so you have to make a lot more copies than normal. So if there’s a problem on one or two sheets, all of a sudden that problem is on 30 sheets instead as you’re copying them so fast to make up the gap and this kinda jank copy is all you have available to make copies from.
The later problem is that life goes on. Cells die in general, you get more sunburns, anything that means more copies have to be made. Well now there’s 30 copies of the paper with a little scribble on the corner. If one of *those* copies gets a smudge in the middle and gets sent to the printer, all of a sudden you have 30 papers with a scribble and 30 papers with a scribble and a smudge. After that its a scribble, smudge, and weird glare that makes parts of it hard to read.
Now repeat this again and again and you have the basic idea of how cells accumulate damage. Yeah that one sunburn when you were 12 probably isn’t gonna cause cancer on its own. But if you keep having burns and irritation and such, you’re going to have more and more chances for problems to be copied over in that spot
Latest Answers