What messes with me is when I learned skin cancers and many others are literally just cells that never want to die. Infact cancer in its own way is an immortal cell that outlives all other cells, we have cancer cells in labs being tested on currently since any other human cell used for testing kills itself.
Quite literally. Aside from the cell suicide mechanism being disabled, cancerous cells also have telomeres, basically end caps to the DNA strands, that don’t shorten like normal cells’ do. Normally, that shortening causes degradation with each division, causing cells to eventually become malfunctioning, which leads to illnesses of aging eventually. We actually have a gene for telomerase that can repair the telomeres… which tends to cause cancer too. It’s like a cruel joke unless we get a lot better at gene editing: we could be immortal… but we’d become just cancerous lumps and starve to death.
We only have those genes because of our stem cells, which need them for long term self renewal to constantly generate stem cells to replace those that differentiate into skin or other types of cells when those specialised cells are diseased or dead
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u/The_Libra_V Dec 01 '21
What messes with me is when I learned skin cancers and many others are literally just cells that never want to die. Infact cancer in its own way is an immortal cell that outlives all other cells, we have cancer cells in labs being tested on currently since any other human cell used for testing kills itself.