Thursday, May 5, 2016

I AM CONFUSED

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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