Cell mutation Quotes

Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.

He was a clot looking for a place to happen, a splinter of bone hunting a soft organ to puncture, a lonely lunatic cell looking for a mate - they would set up housekeeping and raise themselves a cozy little malignant tumor.

Cancer is like another form of life. It's closely related to healthy life. A healthy body is one form of life. Cancer is in a way nature's experiment with life.

Astonishingly, in spite of decades of research, there is no agreed theory of cancer, no explanation for why, inside almost all healthy cells, there lurks a highly efficient cancer subroutine that can be activated by a variety of agents - radiation, chemicals, inflammation and infection.

We are all precancerous.

Cancer essentially lives in us and becomes activated at some point, and then cells begin to psychotically divide. Initially, the cancer cell looks like other cells and the body invites it in.

Muscle is constantly being used - constantly being damaged. If every time we tore a muscle or every time we stretched a muscle or moved in a wrong way, cancer occurred - I mean, everybody would have cancer almost.

In a way, cancer is so simple and so natural. The older you get, this is just one of the things that happens as the clock ticks.

Cancer cells have a lot of other things that are really wrong with them, and we should never forget that these are cells that have become deaf to all the signals that the body sends out, such as you can multiply a certain amount, you can be in a certain place in the body, where to stay, where to move, and so on.

Madness is locked beneath. It goes into tissues, is swallowed by the cells. The cells go mad. Cancer is their flag. Cancer is thegrowth of madness denied.

When are we going to say cancer is cured? I'm not sure when that will happen, if that will happen because cancer is a very slippery disease and it involves a vast number of cells in the body and those cells are continually mutating.

If you inhale a millionth of a gram of plutonium, the surrounding cells receive a very, very high dose. Most die within that area, because it's an alpha emitter. The cells on the periphery remain viable. They mutate, and the regulatory genes are damaged. Years later, that person develops cancer. Now, that's true for radioactive iodine, that goes to the thyroid; cesium-137, that goes to the brain and muscles; strontium-90 goes to bone, causing bone cancer and leukemia.

Only cells that had been transformed by a virus or a genetic mutation had the potential to become immortal.