1114 Curing Cancer

Cancer is when a single cell mutates and no longer kills itself. (That's how cells renew, they split then the old one turns off.) As time goes by and this one cell splits but doesn’t go away, then splits again, and again, all creating new immortal cells. Eventually the mass (cancer) destroys everything around it. When one of them gets into your bloodstream, it's all over because those immortal cells will be spread all over your body to create many ever-growing masses. Chemotherapy is a cocktail of drugs that kills all “new” cells but that means noncancerous new cells too: your hair, the cells in your mouth & intestines, your immune system. No wonder people get so sick on Chemo. However, there is a new cancer treatment that is much more strategic: it uses the patient’s own immune system to seek-and-destroy the immortal cells. Doctors biopsy a mutant cancer cell from the patient then use gene-splicing to specifically identify the mutants and only the mutants for destruction. Right now the costs are too high so it’s only used on children but it will be available to everyone in the future.