Teenager Eva Vertes has some of the best ideas on the future of cancer
research. She observed what we knew back in the 1970's that cancer is
an evolutionary phenomenon that acts to repair damaged tissue and
usually does not kill the host until an age where reproduction is
finished. She extends that to an analysis of why the heart and skeleton
muscle doesn't get cancer and observes that microtumors are seen in
skeletal muscle but the tumors cannot develop blood supplies to grow.
Apparently, the amount of repair in muscle would cause everyone to get
cancer all the time, so the body has had to evolve the handling of the
cancer repair mechanisms to make it work properly in muscle, whereas in
other parts of the body the repair mechansm goes hairwire and kills the
host.

She concludes that in the future, cancer cells make be used as therapy
which can repair the body if and when they can be controlled properly.

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Posted By Jeff Sutherland to Dr. Jeff Sutherland's Electronic Medicine
at 10/22/2009 05:13:00 AM