Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death

by Nick Lane

‘The dream of every cell is to become two cells’ said François Jacob, the most lyrical revolutionary of molecular biology. No cell lives the dream so wholly or so senselessly as a cancer cell, turning dream to nightmare. Nothing else captures the myopic immediacy of natural selection so starkly. The moment is all that matters for selection: there is no foresight, no balance, no slowing at the prospect of doom. Just the best ploy for the moment, for me, right now, not for the many, and often mistaken. Cancer cells die in piles, necrotic flesh worse than the trenches. The decimated survivors mutate, evolve, adapt, exploit their shifting environment, selfish to the bitter end. Their horror is that they know no bounds. They will eat away at our flesh to fuel their pointless lives and deaths, until, if we are unlucky, they take us too. I am writing about cancer, but must confess that I have the pointless greed and destruction of humanity at the back of my mind. May we find it within ourselves to be better than cancer cells.