CP695J Cancer cell scientific 3d illustration
Source: BBC
By Melissa Hogenboom
Will we ever win the “war on cancer”?
The latest figures show just how distant a prospect victory is right now. In the US, the lifetime risk of developing cancer is 42% in men and 38% in women, according to the American Cancer Society. The figures are even worse in the UK. According to Cancer Research UK, 54% of men and 48% of women will get cancer at some point in their lives.
And cases are on the rise. As of 2015 there are 2.5 million people in the UK living with the disease, according to Macmillan Cancer Support. This is an increase of 3% each year, or 400,000 extra cases in five years.
Cancer is not only extremely pervasive, but also becoming more and more common
Figures like this show that cancer is not only extremely pervasive, but also becoming more and more common. But why will so many people develop the disease at some point in their lives?
To get to the answer, we must understand that cancer is an unfortunate by-product of the way evolution works. Large and complicated animals like humans are vulnerable to cancer precisely because they are large and complicated.
But even though it is evolutionary processes that have made cancer such a problem, it is also evolutionary thinking that is now leading to pioneering treatments that could stack the odds against cancer and in favour of our health.
The better a cell is at dividing, the more successful it will be (Credit: Sebastian Kaulitzki/Alamy)
To understand how cancer exists at all, we need to go back to a fundamental process that occurs in our bodies: cell division.
A cancerous cell breaks all the rules of controlled division that our other cells follow
We each started out when an egg and sperm cell met and fused. Within a few days, that egg and sperm had turned into a ball containing a few hundred cells. By the time we reach adulthood about 18 years later, those cells have divided so many more times that scientists cannot agree, even to the nearest few trillion, exactly how many cells our bodies contain.
Cell division in our bodies is very heavily controlled. For instance, when you were first growing your hands, some cells went through “cell suicide” – a process called apoptosis – to carve out the spaces between your fingers.
Categories: Biology, Cancer, Evolution, The Muslim Times