This time I'm not going to make any promises. I'm going to try and keep this place going better than I have done but I may get distracted again. There's a lot of fun stuff ahead, but it should mean you'll get to see me cropping up in other places very soon. In other news, if you didn't see it, I got a post on the Nature.com network on Monday which I'm very excited about. It's on the theme of new beginnings and organising my first conference.
I'd also like to say a quick hello to some of my readers that I've had the good fortune to meet around Cambridge since I last posted anything. I'm always surprised that people have actually heard of my ramblings and am glad that I'm not talking to myself here (although after so much inactivity that may have changed :S )
Anyway, people are always asking me if I've cured cancer yet. This is one of the things that my lab and many others are working towards, in a roundabout sense. But it seems likely that there will never be one cure for all cancer and here's why:
At the risk of being cliché, given all the recent media
activity (which I have spectacularly missed the opportunity to write about),
finding the ‘cure for cancer’ is to biology what the Higgs Boson was to
particle physics. Everyone’s working on it and it means a lot – not just to our
understanding of the universe, but to human healthcare – and it may not even
exist.
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| People like to think there can be a simple pill that will fix any problem in life from cancer to cellulite, obesity to osteoarthritis (source). |
It’s very nice and easy to think of one simple, easy to
administer cure – this is the ultimate dream for many illnesses – but most
diseases just aren’t that simple, in particular a ‘cure for cancer’ is a very
misleading concept. It suggests that
cancer is one illness that is the same every time it occurs and therefore
should have the same solution each time. Actually, there are probably as many
cancers as there are people with cancer, with each one unique and different to
any other, to some extent.
