![]() ![]() The story of the war on cancer spans centuries and continents. Its casualties number in the hundreds of millions – nearly one in two men, and one in three women will fight cancer directly nearly all of us will feel its collateral damage. Fought with razor-sharp scalpals, invisible rays, and lethal poisons, its battlegrounds are deep within the human cell. It is the longest running war in human history. If we seek immortality, then so, too, in a rather perverse sense, does the cancer cell. Malignant growth and normal growth are so genetically intertwined that unbraiding the two is one of the most significant scientific challenges faced by our species. Cancer is built into us: the genes that unmoor normal cell division are not foreign to our bodies but rather mutated, distorted versions of the very genes that allow us to grow, to adapt, to recover, to repair – to live. ![]()
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