A Final Thought: Cancer is pissing me off
By Mitch Allen
Cancer is really starting to piss me off. It’s like this quirky cousin who’s continually knocking us upside the head for no reason or sticking his foot out to trip us just for fun. He takes our ATM card when we aren’t looking and wipes out our savings. He knows our PIN number because he’s a sneaky b**tard. He borrows the car then comes home without it, citing some lame excuse. He eats the last potato chip. He leaves a ring in the bathtub.
He’s a jerk, a psychopath.
A murderer.
Still, we let him live with us.
“He’s family,” we say. “What can you do?”
It seems that cancer is picking on half the people I know. Just two weeks ago, I lost a dear friend to breast cancer while at the same time my best friend from childhood was having his nose rebuilt due to skin cancer. I have three close friends and family members going through chemo right now for ovarian cancer. I lost my mother to lung cancer and my father and several friends to kidney cancer. Other friends are battling it now.
Some of these people are old; most are not.
One is an eight-year-old little girl.
One is Jeopardy’s Alex Trebek who just announced that he’s been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer (okay, he’s not a personal friend, but I feel like I know him).
I’m done with cancer. Someone needs to take him out behind the barn and, well, you know.
A lot of smart, dedicated people are working on this, but we need more. As I understand it, there are thousands of people spending billions of dollars researching cures for various cancers, but that isn’t even close to enough. Billions? A drop in the bucket in this era of the burgeoning billionaire class.
I don’t know it for a fact, but I bet all of the scientists in all of the world who are researching cancer right now wouldn’t fill a single Big Ten football stadium on a Saturday in October. Why don’t we have millions of researchers spending trillions of dollars? We have Silicon Valley for tech research. Where is the Silicon Valley for cancer research? Where is today’s John F. Kennedy inspiring us by declaring that we will cure cancer by a given date in the future?
I know, it’s complicated. Cancer (as my layman’s mind understands it), is caused by mutations, a change in the instructions that DNA gives to dividing cells causing them to misbehave in various ways. Cell divisions happen all the time, as many as two trillion times a day depending on how you do the math, so mutations are inevitable. But the body is smart. There are DNA-repair mechanisms in which a cell identifies and corrects damage to DNA molecules.
But some mistakes don’t get repaired.
Remember the old Telephone Game, where someone whispers a secret message to someone else and that person whispers it to another until the last person reveals the secret and it hardly resembles the original message? Now, imagine playing that game not with a dozen friends, but with trillions. Every time a cell divides, there is a chance to miscommunicate the instructions.
Many environmental factors have been identified as “carcinogens” which can damage DNA, encourage cells to divide faster than normal, and cause other forms of cellular malfeasance. These include tobacco, asbestos, radiation and a host of chemicals, many found in our everyday lives.
I’m no doctor (I’ve been known to faint in the presence of needles so I am in awe of health care providers), but with so many cell divisions and so many carcinogens in the environment, it seems unlikely that we will cure cancer by stopping the mutations that cause it. Mutations are a fundamental part of biology that have helped create the vast diversity of life on our planet.
Instead, we have to stop cancer from growing once it forms.
In other words, we might not be able to prevent our psychopathic cousin from coming to visit, but we can quickly tie him to a chair so he doesn’t do any damage.
No one seems to know exactly how this will happen. It might be some hitherto unknown pharmaceutical compound growing in the Amazon rainforest. It might be microscopic robots inspired by nanotechnology with the helping hand of AI. Or some vaccine serum we discover in the libraries of the Lost City of Atlantis.
I don’t know and I don’t care, but let’s get on with it. The wait is killing us.
I feel like Inigo Montoya in the movie The Princess Bride. I long for the day when I can look cancer in the eye and say:
“You killed my father, prepare to die.”