Cellular Transformation Quotes

Astonishingly, in spite of decades of research, there is no agreed theory of cancer, no explanation for why, inside almost all healthy cells, there lurks a highly efficient cancer subroutine that can be activated by a variety of agents - radiation, chemicals, inflammation and infection.

Cancer cells have had so many other things go wrong with them, genetic, non-genetic changes, that those cells, one of the things they then get selected for is that they have lots of telomerase because now the telomeres in those cells get maintained.

They say every five years the atoms in your body become a new set of atoms.

Pluripotent cells have the ability to grow into any cell in the body.

We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.

The actual atoms and molecules that make up my brain and body today are not the same ones that I was born with on September 8, 1954, a half-century ago this month.

Madness is locked beneath. It goes into tissues, is swallowed by the cells. The cells go mad. Cancer is their flag. Cancer is thegrowth of madness denied.

Only cells that had been transformed by a virus or a genetic mutation had the potential to become immortal.

We don't notice that our cells are turning over all the time. You get a completely new composition of cells every seven years, and on the surface, or subjectively, it looks as though you're the same for seven years. It's like a ground - it looks stable, but beneath it, everything is shifting all the time. It's exciting and dangerous.