What are carcinogens, how do they work in the cells and how do scientists know what is and what isn’t a carcinogen?
In: Biology
Say a saboteur breaks into a fully automated factory, finds the computer that tells the factory what to do and what to produce and changes those instructions in a way that is not picked up by quality control. Obviously, the factory now goes haywire, starts overproducing, underproducing, producing garbage, using too much energy, etc.
This is essentially what a carcinogen is, and how it operates. Scientists can figure out what a carcinogen is by looking at the effects of exposure to a substance and the cancer risk in subjects exposed to said substances. For example, in people who smoke cigarettes, there is a known increase in lung cancer rates compared to non-smokers. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that cigarette smoke is a carcinogen. Scientists can also perform animal studies, by deliberately exposing an animal (usually a rat) to a suspected carcinogen, and checking if the rat develops cancer.
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