3 ms·
All of us have some amount of cancerous cells at any given point in time, we just don't notice most of the time because our body is quite adept at detecting and
by Dalewyn 4y ago
All of us have some amount of cancerous cells at any given point in time, we just don't notice most of the time because our body is quite adept at detecting and neutralizing cancerous cells before they become a problem.
What we call "cancer" are the cancer cells that managed to slip past the body's defences, so "curing cancer" doesn't necessitate addressing all cell copy errors. We just need to figure out how to deal with the small handful our body can't address.
- robocat 4y agoI agree we all have many benign cancers. But chronic cancer is not really cured cancer. You seem to be suggesting we could find a way to detect harmful cancers and ignore benign cancers, but I am fairly sure that any “detection” couldn’t be discriminating enough (~100% true positive) to say it was a cure for cancer. Also cancer is often noticed once it has already caused damage, perhaps harmful damage, so your cancer is “cured” but the patient would sometimes get loss of function.