No Cure For Cancer is Big Business

Have you ever thought that there must be financial motivation to intentionally hide, or ignore cures for cancer? 

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If cancer weren’t such a son of a bitch, you might admire its cunning resilience...

The suspicion is understandable, even if unreasonable. I’ll explain, however, why it’s improbable. To understand cures, one must understand the disease. In the case of cancer, it’s not one disease it is many diseases. It takes on many forms, starting from many places, driven by many factors, and using many sources of fuel. It is, as Siddhartha Mukherjee eloquently and adequately named it, “The Emperor of All Maladies.” If cancer weren’t such a son of a bitch, you might admire its cunning resilience

Why is it improbable that we’ll find a cure for cancer? The answer is simple: cancer is natural. Natural in the same way that all things age and decay. It’s a predicament whereby the checks and balance systems written within our genes, that when healthy regulate cell growth, eventually breakdown. If you think about your skin as you age it steadily loses its elasticity, its fullness, and you start to develop wrinkles and spots. However, it isn’t your skin that’s old since your body is constantly making new skin cells, but rather the system that’s old. Over time your DNA doesn’t make skin cells the way it used to, much the same as the genes that would ordinarily regulate cell growth and stop cancer from overtaking your system gets old too. Now that doesn’t explain how a newborn child who hasn’t aged long enough for their DNA to breakdown may develop cancer, but that’s a topic for a different article. 

Cancer is a result of the breakdown of your molecular-level “immune” system...

If you recall from my previous article, you have genes that tell your cells when to replicate, ones that tell them to stop, genes that fix errors made in the replication process, and ones that instruct the cell to die (called apoptosis, or a programmed death). Cancer is a result of the breakdown of your molecular-level “immune” system instructions, mostly as a result of aging. Or from exposure to cancer-causing factors like smoking. And, like most systems, when one part starts to go so do the others. With cancer, there's usually an accumulation of instruction errors, and that's why I say it's not one disease it is several.

In my previous posted explanation of how BRCA (a tumor suppressor gene) and other genes help defend against cancer. Let's briefly revisit inherited defects in your genes.

You’re born with two copies of each gene: a copy from mom and a copy from dad. They pair up and work in unison. If you’re born with an inherited defect in an oncogene or tumor-suppressor gene, like BRCA, only one copy is defective not both. That’s why you should always know the cancers which run on both sides of your family. I like to think of them as pairs of legs. Having a cancer-causing defect would be like having one bad knee. If you were walking downhill that knee would not be able to take the weight of your body so the other knee would have to compensate. Over time, you might imagine that the good knee would eventually wear out. While not a perfect analogy, it illustrates how being born with one defective BRCA or Lynch gene may result in cancer earlier in life (usually before 50).

...there are remarkable advancements in research and early clinical trials herald a promising future

So whether you're born with genetic defects, or the accumulate through aging, there exist spectacularly effective treatments these days. Currently, there are ones aimed to kill off those cells which carry specific genes which have gone defective. Additionally, there are promising discoveries on ways to enhance your immune system to detect and infiltrate cancer and other novel approaches. The amount of money being invested in these technologies is massive. So is the financial reward these companies stand to gain. All in all, there are remarkable advancements in research and early clinical trials herald a promising future to those of us concerned with getting cancer. However unless scientists uncover ways to stymie or altogether halt the aging process, it's improbable there will ever be a cure to natural, but all so frightfully cruel, cancer.

So now you know that cancer is a disease of aging and that you're born with the ability to fend it off. You should do your best to help your body by avoiding carcinogens which may work against your body's defenses and in favor of cancer.