Causes

Cancer is a diverse class of diseases which differ widely in their causes and biology. Any organism, even plants, can acquire cancer. Nearly all known cancers arise gradually, as errors build up in the genetic material of the cancer cell and its progeny.

Anything which replicates (our cells) will probabilistically suffer from errors (mutations). Unless error correction is properly carried out, the errors will survive, and might passed along to daughter cells. Normally, the body tries to perform error correction via numerous methods, such as: apoptosis, helper molecules (some DNA polymerases), possibly senescence, etc. However these error-correction methods often fail in small ways, especially in environments that increase make errors more likely to arise and propagate. For example, such environments can include the presence of disruptive substances called carcinogens, or recovering from injury, or environments the cell was not designed for such as hypoxia^[4] (see subsections). Cancer is thus a progressive disease, and these progressive errors slowly accumulate until a cell slowly begins to act contrary to its intended purpose.

The errors which cause cancer are often self-amplifying, eventually compounding (like money) at an exponential rate. For example:

• A mutation in the error-correcting machinery of a cell might cause that cell and its children to accumulate errors more rapidly
• A mutation in signaling (endocrine) machinery of the cell can send error-causing signals to nearby cells
• A mutation might cause cells to become neoplastic, causing them to migrate and disrupt more healthy cells
• A mutation may cause the cell to become immortal (see telomeres), causing them to disrupt healthy cells forever