I’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of $1000 to communicate their work.
Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
This zone is the Disease Zone. It has scientists studying the causes and processes of illness . Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
A great question, Sarah.
Cancer is caused when our DNA mutates in such a way that our cells grow and multiply out of control. Sometimes the mutation is caused by something we come into contact with (like smoking causing lung cancer, or too much sun causing skin cancer), but as we get older, our DNA may mutate on its own, because the machinery our body uses to copy it stops working as well, and this can also cause cancer.
Now, think about how much DNA you have in just one cell in your body. One of your chromosomes is about 220 million base pairs long, and you have 46 chromosomes in each cell! So if you think about all the different places you could get a mutation in your DNA, all the different changes this could cause to how that cell functions, and all the different parts of your body where that mutated cell could be, you realise that cancer isn’t just one disease, it is hundreds of them! We might find a way to stop people from developing some types of cancer (like the Gardasil vaccine for Human papillomavirus, which causes cervical cancer), or be able to treat cancer once someone has it, but all those possible mutations, and the fact that they are more likely to occur more as we get older, mean that finding a “cure” for all cancer is very unlikely.
Thankfully, we are getting better at treating many types of cancer once they develop, and survival rates for many types of cancer are improving. The more we understand about the many different types of cancer, the better our treatments will be, and the more lives we will save.
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I think that would be the best invention ever! To find a cure, you first need to understand what is going wrong and why. Then, you can try and fix it.
It has taken us years to actually identify what goes wrong inside the cells for cancer, but…..one cancer is not the same from the other! A lung cancer may be very different from breast cancer, and even within breast cancer, there are many different varieties. Some breast cancers are ‘mild’ and we can cure them if we find them on time, but other types of breast cancers are ‘aggressive’ and we simply can’t stop them!
So some cancers we have indeed found cures for and we can cure them if the patient sees a docter on time…..but a lot of other cancers are still a mystery to us, and we need more time to come up with something to stop them.
The other problem is that for many cancers, you don’t feel anything untill the cancer has already grown really big and has spread throughout your body…..it’s often too late for cancer drugs to be effective.
And we also have a problem with drugs! We can treat some cancers in mice with a drug and cure them, but then when we try out this drug in people, it doesn’t work at all or makes people really sick! So the majority of drugs we discover, can never be used in people because they cause too many bad side effects!
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I think that Vanessa and Natasha have done a good job in addressing this question directly. The only thing I’d like to add to it is a link to a webcomic I read that did a really nice job of explaining why there’s no cure for cancer yet (and why there won’t be a cure for cancer). It’s from Ph.D. Comics, which is a great favourite among graduate students (and if you want to get an idea of what grad school life is like, it’s a great thing to read if you don’t take it too seriously!). But the creator of that comic did a talk at a cancer center and spoke to the researchers about cancer, and this is what he found out.
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