"Cell division allows us as organisms to grow, to adapt, to recover, to repair- to live. And distorted and unleashed, it allows cancer cells to grow, to flourish, to adapt, to recover, and to repair- to live at the cost of our living. Cancer cells grow faster, adapt better. They are more perfect versions of ourselves." (6)
"Cancer is an expansionist disease; it invades through tissues, sets up colonies in hostile landscape, seeking "sanctuary" in one organ and then immigrating to another. It lives desperately, inventively, fiercely, territorially, cannily, and defensively-at time, as if teaching us how to survive. To confront cancer is to encounter a parallel species, one perhaps more adapted to survival than even we are.
This image- of cancer as our desperate, malevolent, contemporary doppelgänger- is so haunting because it is at least partly true. A cancer cell is an astonishing perversion of the normal cell. Cancer is a phenomenally successful invader and colonizer in part because itnexploitsnthe very features that make us successful as a species or as an organism." (36)
Great description of cancer-- it is really evocative. I wonder in what ways it is misleading? Is cancer really invasive? This description almost makes it sound parasitic-- a "successful invader and colonizer." But isn't it more accurately described as a malfunctioning cell?
ReplyDeleteThink of it as one of your own cells going against the system that had once controlled it. It's not so much parasitic, but it is just like the other cells in our body (about to adapt and change to survive).
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