#to drinking water via fracking & situations like flint michigan

[ajaegerpilot]

going over my cell bio notes i wanna share another anecdote from my bio classes this year. on the last class our professor wrote up a bunch of conspiracy theories/general questions ppl have abt cancer on the board. for sake of being interesting I’ll just talk abt the conspiracy theory: ‘Do pharmaceutical companies have a cure for cancer and are ‘holding out’ on us?’

I might spruce this up by the time I actually get to scribing my cancer notes but basically the answer we got, after she got us to fill out like a dozen different ways cancer can be caused either by a mutation in proper gene function which results in the cell becoming cancerous (ie it divides indefinitely and forms a big mass of weirdo cells) was -

Cancer is not one disease! Experiences are all different depending on what tissues it is; it’s a different disease for everyone basically. So how can we have a general cure for everyone and every disease?

So that’s a good thing to tell people who are worried about that kind of thing. There are SO MANY THINGS that can go wrong in cell function which makes cells cancerous, and while we’re trying to fix those things we primarily ‘cure’ cancer now by killing cancerous cells - which brings us to the next point of how will we have a method to target cancerous cell and not kill the other cells?

And the answer to that is I think we don’t really? either thru radiation on one part of the body that has cancer we’re attempting to destroy cancer cells but healthy cells are affected. in chemotherapy i know there’s one chemical we use which inhibits cell replication by fucking with telomerase & other molecules involved in cell replication with the understanding that cancer cells way fucking more than regular cells - but so do the cells of our stomach lining so that’s why ppl using that drug in chemotherapy suffer in that specific way - the stomach lining cells are casualties. a friend of mine did her presentation topic on delivering drugs to cancerous tissues by putting the drugs into liposomes (little blobs of fat with a watery center) which theoretically bob around in our bloodstream harmlessly until they get to blood vessels in cancerous tissue which are ‘leakier’ (wrt tight junctions b/w cells, if im not mistaken) and where the liposomes leak out of the blood vessel and delivery the drug directly to the tissue. so like. scientists are working hard in every possible way to try to improve cancer treatment in very interesting ways? and my professor’s mother has dealt with and died from cancer and i’m just?

i don’t think my teacher was posing the question to straight out debunk misconceptions like my eco proff had been but all the same. it’s just frustrating when people fixate on the weirdest things to distrust abt the pharmaceutical industry. there are things to distrust (!!!!!) but charlatans are ready and waiting to profit by misleading you. automatically distrusting the science is not helpful, but I don’t think automatically trusting science is the answer either. sometimes scientists, bc we’re human, really want ppl to understand that we’ve put in the work and while none of what we’re doing is shit you couldn’t do if you were given an education for it I think an attitude some ppl have towards ‘ppl should trust the authority of scientists’ is bad shit since that’s exactly what we, as future scientists, are taught not to do. like we’re taught to question shit and make sure things make sense for ourselves, and to acknowledge when shit doesn’t make sense but it works (and then work on figuring out why it works)

like there are resources online to help explain shit and while much of it is locked behind paywalls that doesn’t change the fact that work is occurring and some of it is accessible. so honestly, given how much of science is inaccessible to ppl I don’t blame them for being distrustful esp w/ a political and media system which doesn’t respect science unless they can make a profit from it but please don’t buy from people who make a profit from encouraging people to be paranoid of scientists! don’t buy their books or jewelry or give them any money at all!! those are my feelings! u can believe whatever u want but like!!! PLEASE DON’T LET PEOPLE MAKE A PROFIT FROM U.

anyhow, another cool question she posed was “Can I genotype you and predict whether you will get cancer?” and the answer was is that some genes can predict you having a disposition for cancer (e.g. BRCA) but they’re not a promise!