57
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 ...
- 52.7k
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 ...
- 2,868
39
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 ...
- 52.7k
35
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 ...
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27
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 ...
- 68.3k
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 ...
- 3,224
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 ...
- 14.2k
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,...
- 1,425
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 ...
- 10.5k
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 ...
- 547
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 ...
- 52.7k
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 ...
- 35.6k
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
10
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 ...
- 8,831
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 ...
- 1,846
8
votes
Accepted
What`s this? (Found among circulating tumor cells)
The cells you're asking about are neutrophils in varying stages of maturity. Neutrophils are the most abundant of leukocytes, and frequently found in cancerous tissue. Note first that they are all ...
- 26k
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 ...
- 22.9k
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 ...
- 2,964
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 ...
- 52.6k
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
7
votes
Is it safe to work with HeLa cells?
Most guidelines for HeLa (and most cells of human origin) say they should be kept at a BSL2 level. For example, from a 2007 publication in Applied Biosafety:
Work with cell cultures from human or ...
- 14.3k
7
votes
Accepted
Could multiplexed CRISPR disable the mitotic and meiotic genes of cancerous cells?
As with all cancer therapeutics one of the biggest problems is how you get the therapeutic to kill cancer cells without also killing so many healthy cells that the therapy kills the patient.
For ...
- 3,645
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 ...
- 3,645
6
votes
Tumour cell injection into a mice
You should not be asking random people on the internet about this. Talk to your lab safety people. Get detailed instructions on handling requirements. As for the hood, again, do not ask here, ask your ...
- 14.3k
6
votes
Accepted
Can mitochondria become cancerous?
Interesting question.
As a prelude, I should probably mention that single celled organisms cannot get cancer as we understand and define it. Mitochondria are not, of course, single celled organisms, ...
- 8,831
6
votes
Is p53 a cyclin dependent kinase?
No, p53 and other tumor suppressor proteins do not belong to Cyclin dependent kinase(CDK)family. p53 blocks the cell cycle by promoting the synthesis of Cyclin dependent kinase inhibitors (CKI ...
- 1,317
6
votes
Accepted
Why would this viral strain-specific antiserum fail to immunoprecipitate the same (98% identical protein) from another strain?
As you note, the viral strains are not identical; it's unclear from your question the actual amount and position of amino-acid differences among them, but it's not surprising that even a portion of ...
- 1,721
6
votes
Accepted
Why does a non-functional retinoblastoma protein cause tumours in the cells of the retina specifically?
From Wikipedia:
The retinoblastoma protein ... is a tumor suppressor protein that is dysfunctional in several major cancers
So, although it's commonly associated with retinoblastoma, it's not ...
- 47.2k
5
votes
What if our whole body is made up of cancer cells?
No.
One aspect of cancer cells is that they no longer follow their programming, ie they stop doing all the work that a normal cell in that particular part of your body would do.
The next aspect is ...
- 2,940
5
votes
Database of cancer cells
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has a list of doubling times for a variety of commonly used cell lines, see
https://dtp.cancer.gov/discovery_development/nci-60/cell_list.htm
I my experience, ...
- 5,735
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible