“The miracle of life”: some truth in advertising

It’s everywhere: articles on recent research to find a cure, stories of people battling it, public service announcements to get tested for it. It’s cancer and somewhat ironically, this topic is taking over the medical field and people’s lives just as fast as the disease manifests itself. And yet, I believe that many people have yet to grasp the full extent of this disease or how it comes about. To begin with, I was fully flabbergasted to discover – while I was reading up on DNA repair for Mod 1, of course – that simple cellular activities and just everyday exposure to radiation can cause between 10,000 and 1 million DNA lesions in EVERY CELL of our body in just one day! Lesions that could lead to mutations, if not fixed. And we all know what mutations can lead to.

How are any of us even alive, you ask? Precisely my thoughts! Turns out cells are these superiorly sophisticated, MIT-level engineers because they’ve already got this all figured out. In 20.109, we spent a lot of time learning about base excision repair, this fantastic and evidently accurate method of fixing those thousands of lesions before they become mutations and lead to something like cancer. So we can all let out that collective sigh of relief. But still, I continue to marvel at just how intricate and delicate the body is and how truly lucky the vast majority of people are to not have some life-altering mutation. I know that wasn’t at all what the CometChip experiments were about, but this might be my biggest take-away from Mod 1. Learning about CometChip honestly just made me reflect on the huge importance of cancer prevention and the fact that mutations aren’t just something we can get if we ingest carcinogens or sun-tan too long.

On a related note, I think it’s so cool that there are these emerging tools to easily test our DNA repair capability. It turns out that this might be THE ultimate factor in how likely we are to get cancer.  So regardless of how healthy we think we are, why not test our body’s DNA repair potential early and prepare ourselves best against mutagens? I definitely hope things like CometChip become more commercially available and accessible to people. Cancer preventions seems to be piquing the interest of researchers lately and rightfully so, because we want to stop cancer in its tracks, way before it can even THINK of metastasizing.