The true origin is this: In every cell of your body, perhaps 37 trillion, there is a copy of your genome, with approximately 3,235,000,000 nucleic acid pairs arranged in two rows; most of them divide and create copies of themselves. So throughout your life, your body will silently make quadrillions, quintillions, probably sextillions and septillions of copies of base pairs.
Is it any wonder that this process isn't perfect?
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Sometimes things go wrong. Sometimes it's just luck: the copy machine is not completely perfect, sometimes it slips.
Sometimes it's due to a variety of risk factors: ionizing radiation (like the sun, radon, or nuclear fallout), or damage from cigarette smoking, or HPV, or perhaps certain dietary factors.
There are dozens, if not hundreds of different cancers, very distinct diseases although they are unified in the basic underlying principle: a modification or a copying error (one way or the other, a mutation ) causes cells to stop reproducing when they should stop: uncontrolled cell division. Cells don't respond to normal cues like "you're done, die now"
Cancer is not just a human disease . The rats have cancer. Dogs have cancer. Tasmanian devils have a very serious type of infectious cancer that threatens their survival as a species. Sharks have cancer.
On the other hand, it makes the idea that shark cartilage can cure cancer doubly silly because sharks are immune to it. Not only is there no reason for eating an immune creature to protect you, but to say that sharks are immune is completely wrong.
Hundreds of millions of years ago, when the great dinosaurs walked the Earth, the dinosaurs had cancer.
Unless you buy into the ABC sitcom dinosaur model, I think you'll agree that dinosaurs probably weren't inclined to a sedentary lifestyle with too much smoking, TV, and fast food.
Certain facets of modern life increase the risk of cancer - smoking, air pollution, probably certain foods (but not cell phones; this one seems to be a myth - and certainly not microwave ovens) .
But the main reason why cancer is on the rise is simply that although we are getting better at treating cancer, we are still much better at treating many other diseases than we are at treating cancer.
In other words, more and more people today are dying of cancer because they are past the age when their ancestors would have died of malaria, smallpox or the plague.
Cancer, you see, is a disease of old age : the longer you live, the more likely your cells are to make mistakes. Doctors are great at keeping people alive long enough for them to get cancer; all they have to do now is catch up on cancer treatment.
(Although a cancer patient today will probably live much longer than the same cancer patient thirty years ago).
