Question: could you cure cancer ?

Ailsa Powell answered on 13 Jun 2011:

Hi Krissycool,
This is a good question and one that deserves a good answer (which I hope I can give).

Very simply, I personally could not cure cancer. But there are a few reasons for this…

Firstly, I don’t work in cancer research. It’s not that I don’t think it’s important, I like many people have had people close to me die of cancer. But in terms of what interests me in disease research it’s the infectious diseases caused by bacteria and parasites I find fascinating and to do research properly you it helps to work on the questions that fascinate you most. But the types of experiments I do in the lab would be similar to the ones someone doing cancer research would do (people in the lab I work in do research into cancer), so the techniques I use could be applied to cancer research.

Secondly, there many different types of cancer and there are many different causes of cancer, so there can never be a single cure. It would also take many teams of people to be able come up with the cures, people like my colleagues working on the basic functions of the things that have gone wrong in cancer, people who can work out how to try and stop or reverse that process, people developing drug or other types of treatments. It’s a massive task and yet there are treatments developed against specific cancers because there are thousands and thousands of scientists working on these problems, which is amazing.

I also think it’s important not to forget the other diseases, which is in part why I work on other things. Malaria kills up to 1 million people a year and 250 million people can get infected in a year. The countries affected by the disease can suffer economically as so many people are ill and can’t work and a large number of deaths are of children. I also used to work on working out why antibiotics can stop working – you will have heard of the hospital superbugs I guess. Infections like these are becoming more prevalent as the bacteria that cause them become immune to the antibiotics used to try and kill them. Bacterial infections can be killers too – especially if there is no treatment available and someone has a weak immune system. For example if someone had been treated for cancer, the treatments are very harsh on their bodies and so they would be very weak and susceptible to bacterial infections, it’s important to have the drugs available to treat the infection as the patient could end up dying from the bacterial infection after being cured of cancer.

Wow, long answer, hope that has answered your question ok.