Beemouse Laboratories

I’ll preface this by saying that I’m now in school full time studying to become a Medical Assistant (more about that later, but basically this means that in my first quarter I am studying all anatomy/physiology/pathology).

So I was reading the oncology chapter last night, and while I was reading and sort of having a panic attack (full color photos of sarcomas will do that), in the back of my mind, I was thinking about other things. I was reminded of how people often compare the human race to a cancerous growth on Earth. I think it’s a stupid, overused metaphor, piggybacking on the emotional impact of “cancer” to shock the reader, much in the same way that you can throw around the words “fascist” and “Hitler” and still get people to listen to you, even if you don’t know what you’re talking about.

It’s easy to see where this metaphor came from. Malignant tumors increase in size rapidly, and they are invasive and infiltrative, extending into neighboring normal tissue. When they metastasize, cells detach from the primary site and travel around the body, starting new tumors at distant locations.

Here’s what I didn’t know about cancer. Malignant cells are anaplastic. This means that their DNA stops allowing the cells to differentiate and carry on mature cell functions. They start out as immature cells and never change into the cells they were supposed to be. Some cancer cells lose the ability to spontaneously disintegrate when their time is up (that is, apoptosis is no longer programmed into their DNA). That’s pretty weird, and honestly, thinking about it for too long scares me. You’ve got these cells that just keep proliferating and living… forever…

The human/malignancy metaphor breaks down there, because us human cancer cells all grow old and die. (I think some people fear that we lose our identity in a global/wired community, in which so much connectivity causes an inability to “differentiate,” but I think those people just have a limited view of identity.)

When I was getting ready for bed last night, I thought, “cancer doesn’t care”. It doesn’t. That’s one of the scariest things to me. It’s not even that it doesn’t care in the way people don’t care about things, which can at least be rude or heartless– it completely lacks consciousness. It’s a rapidly proliferating “something” that is full of “nothing”.

That’s the biggest failure of the human/malignancy metaphor to me. Us human cancer cells are conscious. Many of us know we’re terrible stewards of our planet. Many of us know we are going to be so, so screwed some day due to our rapid species proliferation. We know, and we regret, and we do something to try and fix it, or put it out of our minds– we keep living, and then we die, usually while thinking about dying (unless the palliative drugs are really good).

If every cancer cell in a malignant tumor was sentient and felt bad about what it was doing to its host, would we think cancer was as bad? If it could say, “I am so, so sorry I’m killing you,” would that change anything? Memo from cancer: “I have spread to every last one of your lymph nodes, and your immune system can no longer function. You’ll be dead soon. Fortunately, we launched probes a while ago and have found other hosts, and we’ll be able to salvage some of our civilization.”