Season 2, Episode 13: Cancer: It's Complicated

Cancer is among the most complex of diseases. For 5,000 years, cancer was thought to be just one disease. Over time, thinking changed, and cancer was viewed as different diseases distinguished by the organ in which it arose. The advent of the microscope revealed cancer to be a cellular disease, different in each of the 200 cell types in the body. The unraveling of the human genome revealed that mutations in genes that governed cell behavior transform the cell to cancer. This episode reveals that the increasing complexity of the nature of cancer has resulted in the increasing complexity of its treatment.