EquALLity wrote:
How long did you know about this, and through what? I didn't realize I was late to the party here.
It's just been general knowledge that viruses *could* be used to do these kinds of things. Of course, going from theory to practice is where all of the work is.
They said in the video at one part that it's been known for about a hundred years that viruses could fight cancer, and the technology to really take advantage of that has only been available recently.
EquALLity wrote:
But I thought it was like you have a lot of cigarettes, and stuff builds up in your lungs over time?
No, it's more just incidental that your lungs also happen to turn black.
Cancer originates from a single cell going rogue and replicating without permission.
Basically, cells are law abiding citizens. They're hardwired to obey hormones and other cues to replicate or stop replicating that the body uses to regulate itself.
Usually if DNA is damaged, the cell basically commits seppuku, and kills itself to protect the body, because DNA damage can produce disastrous results.
But when the DNA that commands them to kill themselves breaks, or it gets another mutation and that failsafe doesn't work for some reason, it can go rogue and starts doing whatever, since the instruction manual is missing pages.
Generally that means unchecked replication, and mutating constantly without killing itself. It just keeps getting worse from there. That's malignant cancer.
It's technically possible for several cells to spontaneously become cancer at once, since it's all about statistics, but it only takes one cell.
That mutation that ultimately made that cell cancer (we could call it the straw that broke the camel's back) can be tracked to a single event of DNA damage, which came from a single molecule (or atom, or photon), which came from a single source; e.g. a single cigarette, a single breath, or a single atom decaying, or a single instance of atomic fusion in a star (or a particle falling into a black hole somewhere).
The thing that killed you started very, very small.
Chaos effect.
