What does it mean to “cure” cancer? Isn’t chemotherapy a largely effective solution? Why do they say cancer hasn’t been cured then?
In: Biology
First, it is important to actually define what cancer is. Cancer is a cell in your body with mutated DNA that turns off its suicide switch and is similar enough that your immune system doesn’t recognize it as a foreign invader. As it grows your body gives it nutrients and it can eventually spread around the body.
Your body normally kills cancerous cells. In addition, damaged cells will normally kill themselves. None of this is foolproof and any cell that divides can eventually become cancerous.
Putting aside the various scientific techniques available to help treat cancer, it is important to have an understanding of why a “cure” is so difficult to come up with. Any cell in your body can theoretically become cancerous at any time. You can’t get a vaccine for that and you can’t pretreat it. Even if you completely remove one type of cancer, another from a completely different cell can show up later in life.
There are outside organisms that can damage cells repeatedly enough that make cancer more likely to happen – cervical cancer as an example. We can greatly reduce the incidence of cervical cancer by preventing the offending organism, but that’s not a cure for cancer as a whole.
There are creatures that live very long lives with almost no incidents of cancer. Research is ongoing there, but short of genetically reengineering the human race there will never likely be a true cure to cancer.
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