All Your Cells Are Cancerous

Cancer is treated as bad and horrible and foreign. It steals resources from your body and produces endless cells with no use that press on your organs and wither them. It creates at random making a twisted mass of tissue that appears alien in a way we associate with gristly horror movies. Cancer in one place in your body may never be noticed until you die of other causes and are autopsied. Cancer in another place may steal your memories from you and all your comfort. Cancer in yet another place or a different one or, in fact, any number of places will take your very life from you in service of its sinister creation of more new cells carrying its mutated DNA.

Cancer is not some tiny mite that sneaks into your body and starts propagating. It's not a bacteria or cold that infects you and festers in your body. It is not some tiny alien seed that gets to you through the air and proceeds to grow inside you. It does have many causes. Chemicals can cause cancer. Radiation can cause cancer. Smoking (though that's mostly the chemicals). Asbestos. The sun. Mostly things boil down to chemicals or radiation even though there are many different names for different kinds and different causes. One of the most blatant causes gets less attention than others. Old age. I guess old people die anyway but young people who get cancer caused by chemicals are a tragedy. Even birth control pills can cause cancer (though not for the reasons you think.)

The description is wrong, though. People do not "get" cancer. It is not catching. Everyone has cancer. Every single person in the entire world. And if they don't have cancer they have another kind of problem entirely. Namely, death. So which would you rather have? Cancer, which can kill you or the lack there of which will cause you to be dead much faster? Evolution chose cancer, obviously. If cancer wasn't good for us in some way than we wouldn't evolved so that every single cell in our body was cancerous. All of them. Your entire body festers with cancer from the moment you are born.

Before you become too bothered I will explain. "Cancer" is actually nothing more than the uncontrolled multiplication of cells. You could say that every time a woman becomes pregnant there's a "cancer" in her womb. Except that it's a special kind of parasitic cancer that grows into something adorable that we feel a biological imperative to love and cherish even though it's just a mass of cancer. Your cells divide and multiply as they grow old and need to be replaced or if you're injured. It happens constantly. But the reason that your cells don't divide out of control all the time is a special gene sequence that can be turned on and off to keep cells from dividing. Division is their natural state after all. But because division causes the DNA in your cells to literally unravel you want to avoid too much of it. That's where the special gene sequence comes in to force your cells to stop dividing unless it's necessary.

What causes the cancer in reality is that gene sequence becoming dysfunctional. Once it's broken it divides and, of courses, passes on the broken gene to the daughter cells which divide again. And again and again and again. Until it's stopped. Or it consumes you. Ironically two of the things that cause cancer are also used to destroy it. Chemical therapy and radiation treatments. Another cause of cancer is old age. By necessity your cells must divide in order to keep you alive. But though the division is normally not as rapid it does slowly unravel the DNA in your cells. The more it unravels and the older you get the more likely it is that the natural division of your cells will cause that very same gene to become broken and the already aged cells to begin to divide out of control.

Much like old age is the way in which Birth Control causes cancer. I know that women get prescribed birth control fairly often to "regulate" their cycles or to reduce the severity of the symptoms. But the way in which birth control pills are designed to work with one week of a placebo pill in the round dispenser forces a woman to have a period once in every twenty-eight days. Though you might be under the misconception that this is "normal" the fact is that women were not designed by evolution to have their cycles every twenty-eight days. Modern women go through three hundred or more cycles in their lifetime and it's not sheerly because they live longer. It's perfectly natural for a adult woman to go almost two years without ovulating. So why do we have a pill that forces a woman to have it once a month? Well, mostly because of the church but the real answer is that we shouldn't. Especially as all that extraneous cell-division caused by the egg bursting through the wall of the ovary every month leads to a higher cancer rate. And not just a higher cancer rate in the ovaries but a higher cancer rate in the breasts caused by the progesterone and estrogen in the pill making a woman's body think it's a little bit pregnant. And I won't even get started on the fact that diet causes breast cancer in men.

So it's not so much that there are more things around us that "give" us cancer these days. And it's not so much the fact that we live longer and have time for more cell divisions. It has a lot more to do with the fact that our cells naturally want to be cancerous. Of course there are things we could do to help prevent that from happening (like reducing radiation levels and changing the way birth control works) but those things don't change the truth. Because the truth is that all your cells are cancerous and there's nothing you can consciously do about it. Are you scared yet? You should be.

Seriously though, we've been doing all right with this cancer thing in the last few thousand years before the advent of modern medicine. I wouldn't worry about it too much. After all, if we didn't have cancer we'd all be dead.