Maine clam bake
Okay, this is getting ridiculous. I used to think that all it took to start a
cancer is a mutation in a single important gene. Take the “tumor suppressor” gene TP53, for
instance, TP53 codes for the protein p53, the so-called “angel of death”. P53 tells defective cells when to die. Absent a functional TP53 gene, a cell will
just go on dividing without limit – turn cancerous. Or so I thought,
Well, it turns out otherwise. Some
people at UW and Fred Hutch have developed a super-fast, super-accurate method
of sequencing DNA, and have found loads of mutated cancer-relevant genes in
perfectly healthy people. People with
cancer have more, but it appears that we all have some. So, I don’t get it; what caused Linda to get
cancer, but not me? The article refers
to something called the burden of potentially cancerous mutations, but
doesn’t explain it. Maybe if I went to
medical school…….
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