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“Cancer is the price we pay for evolution. If our cells couldn’t mutate, we would never get cancer, but we also couldn’t evolve. We would be fixed forever. What this means in practice is that although evolution is sometimes tough on the individual, it’s beneficial for the species.”
Eighty percent of cancers, known as carcinomas, arise in epithelial cells—that is, the cells that make up the skin and the linings of organs.
Only about 1 percent of cancers are found in connective tissue; these are known as sarcomas.
One thing is common to all cancers, however. Treatment is rough.
When the dreadful steel was plunged into the breast—cutting through veins—arteries—flesh—nerves—I needed no injunctions to restrain my cries.
There was so much radium dust in the air that some of the factory girls noticed that they glowed in the dark themselves.
mustard gas dramatically slowed the creation of white blood cells in those exposed to it.
“What is quite remarkable,” one cancer specialist told me, “is that we are basically still using mustard gases. They are refined, of course, but they are really not that much different from what armies were using on each other in the First World War.”
“There’s a lot of collateral damage,” Josef tells me. “Treatments don’t affect just cancer cells, but many healthy cells as well.” The most visible manifestation of this is damage to hair cells, which causes patients’ hair to fall out. More critically, there is also often long-term damage to the heart and other organs.
The “Gram” in Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria has nothing to do with weights and measures. It is named for a Danish bacteriologist, Hans Christian Gram (1853–1938), who in 1884 developed a technique for distinguishing the two major types of bacteria by what color they turned when stained on a microscopic slide.
Exercise regularly. Eat sensibly. Die anyway.
We have become much better at extending life, but not necessarily better at extending quality of life.
He discovered that cultured human stem cells—that is, cells grown in a lab, as opposed to in a living body—can divide only about fifty times before they mysteriously lose their power to go on.
It was a milestone moment for biology because it was the first time anyone had shown that aging was a process happening within cells. Hayflick also found that the cells he cultured could be frozen and kept in storage for any length of time and when thawed would resume their decline from precisely where they had left off. Clearly something within them was serving as a kind of tallying device to keep track of how many times they had divided.
In sum, it’s clear that telomeres are important not just for understanding aging but also for understanding cancer, but unfortunately we are still a long way from fully understanding either.
“The biochemical price of breathing is aging.”
Antioxidants are molecules that neutralize free radicals, so the thinking is that if you take a lot of them in the form of supplements, you can counter the effects of aging. Unfortunately, there is no scientific evidence to support that.
“The reason the notion of oxidation and ageing hangs around is because it is perpetuated by people making money out of it.”
It is a myth, incidentally, that menopause is triggered by women exhausting their supply of eggs. They still have eggs. Not many, to be sure, but more than enough to remain fertile.
It is an interesting fact that women have always outlived men. This is a little counterintuitive when you consider that no man has ever died in childbirth. Nor, through much of history, have men been as closely exposed to contagions through nursing the sick.
It is a myth, and physiological impossibility, incidentally, that hair and nails continue to grow after death. Nothing grows after death.
