PZ Myers
speaker
20 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2015
last heard Jan 2015
PZ Myers’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Cancer is actually a pretty complicated disease.
I mean, there's a lot of different kinds of cancer.
But basically what you've got is a set of cells that are undergoing uncontrolled replication and are often doing things like being invasive and penetrating into other tissues they shouldn't.
So it's basically a small population of cells that have gone nuts and have decided to take over.
What it showed is a correlation between the number of cell divisions to produce a tissue and the likelihood that it would become cancerous.
So what we're seeing in this paper is a quantitative description of what proportion of the errors that lead to cancer are caused by cell division rather than other factors like environmental causes or genetic causes.
Some tissues are fairly stable.
So, for instance, muscle and brain tissue does not divide once it's done developing.
So those tissues have a very, very low likelihood of coming down with cancer, whereas things like the lining of your intestine is constantly being regenerated and sloughed off.
And so those cells have a high proliferative output, and they're much more likely to become cancerous.
Okay, so cancer is actually a pretty complicated disease.
I mean, there's a lot of different kinds of cancer.
But basically what you've got is a set of cells that are undergoing uncontrolled replication and are often doing things like being invasive and penetrating into other tissues they shouldn't.
So it's basically a small population of cells that have gone nuts and have decided to take over.
What it showed is a correlation between the number of cell divisions to produce a tissue and the likelihood that it would become cancerous.
So what we're seeing in this paper is a quantitative description of what proportion of the errors that lead to cancer are caused by cell division rather than other factors like environmental causes or genetic causes.
Some tissues are fairly stable.
So, for instance, muscle and brain tissue does not divide once it's done developing.
So those tissues have a very, very low likelihood of coming down with cancer, whereas things like the lining of your intestine is constantly being regenerated and sloughed off.
And so those cells have a high proliferative output, and they're much more likely to become cancerous.
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