Question: do you think you will ever discover the cure for cancer?how can you get cancers? and is there any way to prevent yourself from getting cancer?

Alexis Barr answered on 17 Jun 2013:

Well we can already sure some cancers – some childhood leukaemias are curable with drugs (chemotherapy) and radiation (radiotherapy) treatment, and lots of cancers, if you catch them early enough, can be cured by surgery – just taking the tumour out. The problem ones are when people only notice very late that they have cancer (because it’s hidden in an organ, like the pancreas) or when cancer cells spread to other organs. I think in the future we will definitely have better drugs to treat cancer but we are also working on ways to try and detect cancer earlier which make it much easier to treat.
Cancer can be caused by many different things (not all of which we know yet). Some people are very unlucky and have a mutation in their DNA that can be inherited from their parents. The good thing here is that some of these mutations are known so we can find people at risk and catch cancer early. Cancer can also be caused my mutations to DNA caused by chemicals in tobacco smoke and by ultraviolet radiation from the sun. You can prevent these by not smoking and always being careful to wear sun screen to stop getting sunburnt. There are also some cancers that are caused by viruses. The best known of these if HPV or Human Papilloma Virus which can cause cervical cancer. Luckily, we now have a vaccine to prevent girls getting infected in the first place. There is also some evidence that eating healthily and staying fit can reduce the risk of getting cancer.