56
votes
Why are organs not harvested from deceased cancer patients?
There are different reasons why cancer patients are mostly excluded from donating organs.
Although the probability of transmitting cancer is small, it is not zero. Also tumors tend to form metastases ...
- 51.2k
42
votes
Accepted
Can vitamin B17 cure cancer?
Laetrile/Amygdalin has been claimed to be a suitable treatment for 'cancer' (which is a summary term for an extremely heterogeneous class of diseases). Even though laetrile/amygdalin in these claims ...
- 2,878
38
votes
Accepted
Is it possible to make a vaccine against cancer?
It is not only possible, these vaccines are in active development. Biontech (the company which developed the Comirnaty Corona vaccine) was founded to develop vaccines against cancer, Moderna is ...
- 51.2k
36
votes
Accepted
Can a cancerous cell from outside cause cancer in a healthy person?
Can a cancer cells from someone else's body cause cancer in a healthy person?
No. Cancer cells from another person cannot cause cancer in a healthy person. The rare cases of transmissible tumors all ...
- 8,741
28
votes
Can a cancerous cell from outside cause cancer in a healthy person?
Before OP edited his/her question, it was a little unclear whether the question was only about humans. The following answer is more general than asked as it also considers cancers in non-humans
Most ...
- 67.9k
24
votes
Accepted
Why are organs not harvested from deceased cancer patients?
On of the main reasons why cancers are normally not transmissible between different people is basically the same reason as why organ transplants are difficult: histocompatibility.
Every human cell ...
- 3,204
21
votes
Accepted
Is cancer caused by vitamin B17 deficiency?
Short Answer: No.
Background: First of all, there is no such thing as vitamin B17. The compound, amygdalin or laetrile, which is referred to by this term, is not a vitamin1. Amygdalin is indeed a ...
- 14.1k
17
votes
Why does UV radiation from the Sun cause skin cancer?
Rather than 'breaks' caused by high energy radiation, UV radiation causes chemical modifications of the bases ('letters') that make up DNA. There are four bases in the DNA alphabet abbreviated to A,T,...
- 1,415
15
votes
Accepted
Does homeopathic or herbal treatment of cancer have any scientific recognition?
The methodology behind homeopathy is scientific nonsense. If you dilute anything a billion times, it will have no chemical effect, not even if you shake it all the while. So no, homeopathy does ...
- 5,110
15
votes
Why does UV radiation from the Sun cause skin cancer?
There are very many photochemical reactions: Up to 50–100 mutagenic reactions on DNA per second might occur in a skin cell during exposure to sunlight, but are usually corrected within seconds by ...
- 9,592
15
votes
Is it possible to make a vaccine against cancer?
Might not be the answer you're looking for, but there's already a vaccine for one particular type of cancer - cervical cancer. Cervical cancer is largely caused by a virus though (HPV, Human ...
- 537
14
votes
Is cancer caused by vitamin B17 deficiency?
Short version: This is nonsense, cancer does not arise from nutritional deficiencies.
Long version: The substance is called Amygdalin, a poisonous cyanogenic glycoside. It can be found in higher ...
- 51.2k
13
votes
Are all carcinogens mutagens?
How can a non-mutagenic agent be carcinogenic?
An agent that causes overexpression of oncogenes or inhibition of tumor suppressors, would be carcinogenic but not mutagenic.
HPV, for instance, produces ...
- 35.2k
12
votes
Why are cancer rates low in large animals?
Short answer
Large animals do get cancer. They may contract cancer with an incidence less than that estimated by absolute cell numbers, but there seems to be a lack of data on cancer rates in large ...
- 52.2k
12
votes
Are all carcinogens mutagens?
Alcohol itself is non-mutagenic because it does not directly alter DNA. (Additionally ethanol enhances carcinogenesis and is itself not a carcinogen - updated) There are similar non-mutagenic ...
- 147
9
votes
Accepted
Why are only few cigarette smokers prone to cancer?
Cigarette smokers are most certainly prone to cancer. See Cecil Medicine, Chapter 183, on the epidemiology of cancer, exposure to tobacco is the most important environmental risk factor for cancer ...
- 8,741
8
votes
Accepted
Isn't biological immortality strictly speaking impossible?
Good question.
There are many organisms that are technically biologically immortal. However, I would like to point out that the definition of biological immortality is this:
...cells that are not ...
- 1,836
7
votes
Accepted
Can/Have cancer cells be/been used in stem cell culture lines?
Cancer cells can be and are used in cell culture. HeLa cells were the first human cell line to be grown in culture and they were derived from a cervical tumor.
That being said, Cancer cell lines ...
- 4,975
7
votes
Accepted
What is "multiple" myeloma?
J. Von Rustizky, a Russian pathologist working in the laboratory of Friedrich von Recklinghausen (1833–1910) in Strassburg in 1873, introduced the term “multiple myeloma.” At autopsy, a 47-year-old ...
- 22.7k
7
votes
What is the first recorded unambiguous case of childhood cancer?
Osteosarcoma is mostly a disease of teenagers and it leaves characteristic changes in the bone. Sometimes archaeologists find such bones.
I found this
Malignant primary bone tumours were very ...
- 2,974
7
votes
Accepted
Can neurons become cancerous?
Short answer
Neuronal tumors are rare, but they do exist. These cancers develop from neuroblast cells, a population of undifferentiated, dividing precursor cells that will eventually fully ...
- 52.2k
7
votes
Can radiation exposure cause cancer later in life even if no traces of radioactive material are present in the body anymore?
Yes it can, because exposure alone can cause mutations in your genes which is usually the main cause of cancer.
For example, when we get exposed to UV light for longer periods of time, we can get ...
- 559
6
votes
Accepted
Difficulties understanding a pathway
So if you're reading the flowchart, understanding the notation of the arrows is important:
We have rectangles around the gene products
There's a circle, denoted by DNA, noting that the proteins are ...
- 8,091
6
votes
Accepted
Why do epithelial cells arrest in response to serum?
TGF-beta would be a good candidate. To cite:
"TGF-β inhibits G1/S progression in a variety of eukaryotic cell types. Among these, untransformed epithelial cells are particularly sensitive to the ...
- 116
6
votes
Can you Transfer Cancer Between People via Saliva or other Bodily Fluids?
Although transmissible cancer has been found in some species, such as Tasmanian Devils and clams, it is quite rare in most species. Certain viral and bacterial agents that cause cancer, however, can ...
- 2,395
6
votes
Can/Have cancer cells be/been used in stem cell culture lines?
Adding onto AMR's answer, cancer cell lines are used extensively for research. They are typically fast to grow. HeLa Long grow to capacity of a 10cm dish within about 48hours, depending how you split ...
- 509
6
votes
In a tumor, why hypoxic regions have access to glucose?
I think this is a difficult question for which the answer is not clear --- to my knowledge there is little data on metabolism in solid tumors, and no clear consensus in the scientific community. So I'...
- 5,625
6
votes
Why does fever above 102 herald a cancer patient's death?
I'm not sure I agree with that, but if I had to support that assertion, I would say that while patients with COPD, CHF and neurodegenerative diseases may die of hypoxia (no fever there), patients with ...
- 24.7k
6
votes
Is metastatic cancer always lethal if uncured?
What you're asking is essentially to prove a negative ("Are there no ways an unchecked cancer can be non-lethal?"), which is unfortunately more of an exercise in imagination than anything else. The ...
- 324
6
votes
Accepted
Why is cancer more lethal than (hypothetical)infections?
Cancer is not inherently more lethal than bacterial infections. That's simply an artifact of the time we live in. Broad spectrum anti-bacterial drugs we invented in the 1st half of the twentieth ...
- 3,173
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible