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Asked by anon-248683 to Zoya, Tom, Stacey, Laura, James, Connor on 12 Mar 2020.
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James Lees answered on 12 Mar 2020:
Cancer isn’t a single thing.
There are lots of different types of cancers, kind of like the cold. Individuals are being cured from cancer all the time. With improvements in medicine and techniques we’re making strides all the time in increasing life expectancy and cure rates.
With some much work and progress being put into it I can imagine that in the not too distant future getting cancer will be a far less serious problem than it is now.
However because it’s a natural process of the body rather than an external virus it probably can’t ever be gotten rid of like the smallpox but hopefully it wont be too long before actually dying of cancer is relatively rare.
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Zoya answered on 12 Mar 2020:
Cancer is bascially uncontrolled cell growth, it normally happens when the mechanisms that control cell division get hijacked or stop working and the cell basically goes a little crazy and doesn’t realize when it should stop dividing.
Cancer can be bening where there is little to no risk or it can be malignant where there is a huge risk.
Coming to the cure, the current protocol is chemotherapy which is a combination of drugs and radiation. A lot of people die due to complications related to the cancer rather than the cancer itself.
There is extensive research to look for pathways of how the cell goes crazy to stop or reverse it. A very important tumour supressor gene is called TP53 gene. There is also chances that a technique called gene editing maybe used to replace faulty cancer causing genes in the future!
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