Cancer Cell Quotes & Sayings

You've got to get away from the idea cancer is a disease to be cured. It's not a disease really. The cancer cell is your own body, your own cells, just misbehaving and going a bit wrong, and you don't have to cure cancer. You don't have to get rid of all those cells. Most people have cancer cells swirling around inside them all the time and mostly they don't do any harm, so what we want to do is prevent the cancer from gaining control. We just want to keep it in check for long enough that people die of something else. — Paul Davies

Cancer is a disease of the genome. And that's what happens. You make mistakes in a cell somewhere in your body that causes it to start to grow when it should've stopped, and that's cancer. And those mistakes are mistakes of DNA. — Francis Collins

In other languages,
you are beautiful- mort, muerto- I wish
I spoke moon, I wish the bottom of the ocean
were sitting in that chair playing cards
and noticing how famous you are
on my cell phone- picture of your eyes
guarding your nose and the fire
you set by walking, picture of dawn
getting up early to enthrall your skin- what I hate
about stars is they're not those candles
that make a joke of cake, that you blow on
and they die and come back, and you
you're not those candles either, how often I realize
I'm not breathing, to be like you
or just afraid to move at all, a lung
or finger, is it time already
for inventory, a mountain, I have three
of those, a bag of hair, box of ashes, if you
were a cigarette I'd be cancer, if you
were a leaf, you were a leaf, every leaf, as far
as this tree can say. — Bob Hicok

You don't want to inhibit cell division. You want to inhibit cell division in the cancer cells, and even that is not really where you want to do it. You actually want to destroy the cancer cells, which is a different matter altogether. Just stopping them isn't enough - you really want to kill them. — Tim Hunt

Cancer, we now know, is a disease caused by the uncontrolled growth of a single cell. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

I like to talk on the cell when I do interviews. That way, I double my chances of getting brain cancer: from the cell phone, and from the questions. — Garry Shandling

If I found the cure for dystrophy tomorrow, I would do a telethon in four weeks for acute pain that in this country is a bigger problem than cancer, heart, sickle cell, anemia, name it. It is - it's hitting 70 million Americans. — Jerry Lewis

The most dangerous cancer cells are actually the ones that are more like stem cells, which have this ability to produce themselves over and over again. More and more cancer biologists say stem-cell-like cells in cancers are the most dangerous. — Elizabeth Blackburn

What we discovered, counter-intuitively, is that when you start killing a cancer cell, one of the things it does in order to survive is to spread even further. It causes itself to form new blood vessels. We've termed this 'reactionary angiogenesis.' — Patrick Soon-Shiong

They also knew that there was a string of DNA at the end of each chromosome called a telomere, which shortened a tiny bit each time a cell divided, like time ticking off a clock. As normal cells go through life, their telomeres shorten with each division until they're almost gone. Then they stop dividing and begin to die. This process correlates with the age of a person: the older we are, the shorter our telomeres, and the fewer times our cells have left to divide before they die. By the early nineties, a scientist at Yale had used HeLa to discover that human cancer cells contain an enzyme called telomerase that rebuilds their telomeres. The presence of telomerase meant cells could keep regenerating their telomeres indefinitely. This explained the mechanics of HeLa's immortality: telomerase constantly rewound the ticking clock at the end of Henrietta's chromosomes so they never grew old and never died. — Rebecca Skloot

Cancer start when cell in the body being to grow out of control.Cells in nearly any part of the body can become cancer, and can spread to other areas of the body.So you have no need to worried about kidney cancer because we provide the best treatment of Kidney Cancer in Los Angeles. — Cancercenter

I'm a cell in the cancer that killed her. — Isaac Marion

We'll be able to have very intelligent, little robots with computers going inside our bloodstream, keeping us healthy from inside, destroying cancer at the level of one cell. — Ray Kurzweil

Alice, you're not going to get cancer from the cell phone. Especially not from a few minutes on the cell phone." "Meow." Alice sighed. "It's not that I don't trust you, Mommy, but you're not a nurse. Or a doctor. Or a scientist." "A scientist!" Noomi said, giggling. "Scientists — Rainbow Rowell

Cancer essentially lives in us and becomes activated at some point, and then cells begin to psychotically divide. Initially, the cancer cell looks like other cells and the body invites it in. — Eve Ensler

The study of how substances alter gene expression is part of the field of epigenetics. Some chemical exposures appear to turn on and turn off genes in ways that disregulate cell growth and predispose for cancer. From this perspective, our genes are less the command-and-control masters of our cells and more like the keys of piano, with the environment as the hands of the pianist. — Sandra Steingraber

Human nature means battling constantly between being completely self-absorbed and trying to be a communal creature. Nature makes you a communal creature. The ultimate single-minded, self-centered creature is a cancer cell. And mostly, we're not made up of cancer cells. — George Lucas

Cancer is nothing more than a healthy cell that starts replicating out of control. — Dan Brown

For example, you might have a sever sunburn as a child. Many decades later, you might develop skin cancer at that same site. This means it probably took that long for the other mutation to occur and finally tip the cell into a cancerous mode. — Michio Kaku

Skin cancer became personal to my family when my father was diagnosed with basal cell carcinoma. — Landon Donovan

Cell division allows us as organisms to grow, to adapt, to recover, to repair - to live. And distorted and unleashed, it allows cancer cells to grow, to flourish, to adapt, to recover, and to repair - to live at the cost of our living. Cancer cells grow faster, adapt better. They are more perfect versions of ourselves. — Anonymous

The politicized sponsors of this pseudoscientific nonsense should be ashamed to live, let alone die. If you want to take part in the "war" against cancer, and other terrible maladies, too, then join the battle against their lethal stupidity. — Christopher Hitchens

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. — Edward Abbey

The best way to deal with 'Change' is to lead it! — Clifford L. Feightner

A healthy, civilized society can absorb some anger and dysfunction, as a healthy immune system can absorb some disease. But a massive buildup of anger and mean-spiritedness bombarding our social system day in and day out in millions upon millions of individual doses overwhelms our societal defenses. Medicine does little good in the absence of a healthy immune system. Likewise police and other institutional efforts to counter violence do little good, ultimately, in the absence of our individual efforts to deal with it. Violence is routed out of the world only by being routed out of our minds. Hatred is diseased thinking. Just as a cancer cell was a healthy cell that then transformed, so is hatred, love gone wrong. — Marianne Williamson

Hate is a cancer that spreads one cell at a time. — Dave Pelzer

Specificity refers to the ability of any medicine to discriminate between its intended target and its host. Killing a cancer cell in a test tube is not a particularly difficult task: the chemical world is packed with malevolent poisons that, even in infinitesimal quantities, can dispatch a cancer cell within minutes. The trouble lies in finding a selective poison - a drug that will kill cancer without annihilating the patient. Systemic therapy without specificity is an indiscriminate bomb. For an anticancer poison to become a useful drug, Meyer knew, it needed to be a fantastically nimble knife: sharp enough to kill cancer yet selective enough to spare the patient. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

I was working with stem cells as part of a NASA programme. We realised that the science of stem-cell proliferation was also fundamental to cancer cells when cancer enters the phase of metastasis. — Patrick Soon-Shiong

There is a duality in recognising what an incredible disease it is - in terms of its origin, that it emerges out of a normal cell. It's a reminder of what a wonderful thing a normal cell is. In a very cold, scientific sense, I think a cancer cell is a kind of biological marvel. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Earlier this month, the Vatican's top bioethics official condemned as "reprehensible" the assisted suicide of an East Bay woman, Brittany Maynard, who was suffering terminal brain cancer and said she wanted to die with dignity. Francis didn't refer to the Maynard case specifically. While denouncing euthanasia in general, he also condemned abortion, in vitro fertilization and embryonic stem cell research. — Anonymous

The GDP rises whenever money changes hands ... The whole thing is reminiscent of Edward Abbey's reflection that growth for the sake of growth is the philosophy of the cancer cell. — John Robbins

Cancer will be with me for the rest of my life, be it as a nodule, tumor or cell someplace, or in my fears and anxieties. — Kathryn Joosten

I pictured myself as a virus or a cancer cell and tried to sense what it would be like. — Jonas Salk

Those who have not been trained in chemistry201 or medicine may not realize how difficult the problem of cancer treatment really is. It is almost - not quite, but almost - as hard as finding some agent that will dissolve away the left ear, say, and leave the right ear unharmed. So slight is the difference between the cancer cell and its normal ancestor. - William Woglom Life — Siddhartha Mukherjee

My brother died of cancer two years ago (1998), renal cell carcinoma. He was my only real brother and I didn't know what to do. I'd never been so desperate in my life. — Quincy Jones

A cancer cell is an astonishing perversion of the normal cell. Cancer is a phenomenally successful invader and colonizer in part because it exploits the very features that make us successful as a species or as an organism. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Her mother told her once that her father was sick. That the sickness made him do it. She made it seem logical. As if he was lying in a hospital bed with cancer rather than rotting in a prison cell for rape and murder. — Anais Torres

Fighting terrorism is not unlike fighting a deadly cancer. It can't be treated just where it's visible - every diseased cell in the body must be destroyed. — David Hackworth

It only takes one cell to start cancer. — Arnaldur Indridason

Wherever something is wrong, something is too big. If the stars in the sky or the atoms of uranium disintegrate in spontaneous explosion, it is not because their substance has lost its balance. It is because matter has attempted to expand beyond the impassable barriers set to every accumulation. Their mass has become too big. If the human body becomes diseased, it is, as in cancer, because a cell, or a group of cells, has begun to outgrow its allotted narrow limits. And if the body of a people becomes diseased with the fever of aggression, brutzdity, collectivism, or massive idiocy, it is not because it has fallen victim to bad leadership or mental derangement. It is because huma beings, so charming as individuals or in small aggregations, have been welded into overconcentrated social units such as mobs, unions, cartels, or great powers. — Leopold Kohr

Omega-3 is central to cell function and heart health. People who eat a diet rich in omega-3 experience lower rates of heart attack, depression, schizophrenia, ADHD, and Alzheimer's disease. Omega-3 has also been shown to slow the growth of some types of cancer. — Lana Asprey

Ehrlich hedged. The cancer cell, he explained, was a fundamentally different target from a bacterial cell. Specific affinity relied, paradoxically, not on "affinity," but on its opposite - on difference. Ehrlich's chemicals had successfully targeted bacteria because bacterial enzymes were so radically dissimilar to human enzymes. With cancer, it was the similarity of the cancer cell to the normal human cell that made it nearly impossible to target. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Principal Brill, those costumes were made by my mother. My mother, who has stage four small-cell lung cancer. My mother, who will never watch her little boy celebrate another Halloween again. My mother, who will more than likely experience a year of 'lasts'. Last Christmas. Last birthday. Last Easter. And if God is willing, her last Mother's Day. My mother, who when asked by her nine-year-old son if he could be her cancer for Halloween, had no choice but to make him the best cancerous tumor-riden lung costume she could. So if you think it's so offensive, I suggest you drive them home yourself and tell my mother to her face. Do you need my address? — Colleen Hoover

Cancer is not just a dividing cell. It's a complex disease: It invades, it metastasizes, it evades the immune system. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

CELL

Now look objectively. You have to
admit the cancer cell is beautiful.
If it were a flower, you'd say, How pretty,
with its mauve centre and pink petals

of if a cover for a pulpy thirties
sci-fi magazine. How striking:
as an alien, a success,
all purple eye and jelly tentacles
and spines, or are they gills,
creeping around on granular Martian
dirt red as the inside of the body,

while its tender walls
expand and burst, its spores
scatter elsewhere, take root, like money,
drifting like a fiction or
miasma in and out of people's
brains, digging themselves
industriously in. The lab technician

says, It has forgotten
how to die. But why remember? All it wants is more
amnesia. More life, and more abundantly. to take
more. to eat more. To replicate itself. To keep on
doing those things forever. Such desires
are not unknown. Look in the mirror. — Margaret Atwood

This act is as horrible as killing a cancer cell. It must be done for the sake of the future of the whole. So be it: be prepared for the selection process which is now beginning. We, the elders, have been patiently waiting until the very last moment before the quantum transformation, to take action to cut out this corrupted and corrupting element in the body of humanity. It is like watching a cancer grow; something must be done before the whole body is destroyed ... The destructive one fourth must be eliminated from the social body. — Barbara Marx Hubbard

His little bloody rag of a person didn't look as if it could ever get up again, much less hurt anyone. It was only a child. A wounded child.
Like seeing someone you love wasting away with cancer, and then being shown a cancer cell through a microscope. Nothing. That? That did this? That little thing? Destroy my heart. — John Ajvide Lindqvist

Surgery for early stage non-small cell lung cancer is standard treatment and is likely curative. Yet, fewer blacks than whites undergo surgery for the disease, leading to a higher mortality rate among blacks with lung cancer, — Henry Ford

In 2004, a rash of early scientific reports suggested that cell phones, which produce radio frequency energy, might cause a fatal form of brain cancer called a glioma. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, brain and spinal cord disorders, diabetes, cancer, at least 58 diseases could potentially be cured through stem cell research, diseases that touch every family in America and in the world. — Rosa DeLauro