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From Socialist Worker, No. 84, June 1968, p. 7.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
IN THE LAST 200 years medicine has eradicated most of the killer diseases from the advanced countries. This has meant that more and more people have been left to die of the disorders of old age, such as cancer. Cancer is not a disease in the normal sense of the word. In a disease, a germ or virus gets into the body and multiplies, releasing poisons into the blood as it does so. In a cancer there need be no invading organisms; what happens is that part of the body’s machinery goes wrong. The cells making up some particular organ start dividing very rapidly, producing a lump, or tumour, which may block up vital parts of the organ.
Research has shown that tumours may develop spontaneously, or they may be induced by various agents. In this case there are usually two stages: a primary induction followed by a very long period of irritation which stimulates the growth of the cancer.
This explains why it takes as long as 20 years for the tars in tobacco to induce lung cancer – continuous irritation by cigarette smoke is needed before it grows to any extent. But. when it does start, it may grow very rapidly.
Other chemicals that can cause cancer include certain dyes. This was discovered when numbers of workers in one area suddenly started to develop skin and throat cancers. No obvious connection could be found between the men until it was realised they had all been working at the same dye factory some 18 years earlier.
Radiation can also cause cancer. Workers in the Scheerberg coal mines breathe a radioactive coal dust, have a very high rate of bronchial cancer. The survivors of atom bomb blasts have frequently suffered from cancers, especially leukaemia, which is cancer of the bone marrow.
Cancers are very different from the tissues in which they grow. This because the cells of tissue are specialised for a particular job, such as the production of digestive juices, which needs only a small part of the information stored in the cell’s nucleus where the necessary information to make all the body’s proteins is coded on the complex substance DNA.
However in cell division all the DNA is used – an exact copy of the whole must go to each daughter cell. Specialisation and cell division cannot take place together. Specialised cells rarely divide; cancer cells divide rapidly, and lose all trace of specialisation. The problem of what starts a cancer can be restated as “what starts cells dividing?”
Nobody knows the answer to this question. But research into two other fields – fertilisation of the egg starting a very rapid cell division as the first step in reproduction, and the rapid cell division that takes place in wound healing both of which are analogous to cancerous growth – may help solve the problem. Until it is solved, systematic prevention of cancer will be impossible. and attempts to kill the growth. either with dangerously high levels of drugs or radiation, or surgical removal will remain the only treatments for a distressing, frequently painful and lethal disorder.
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Last updated on 30 October 2020