tumor
"This cellular proliferation requires an abnormal amount of fuel. "A tumor is like a manufacturing plant," Dr. Yang said. "It needs machines to allow mass production of building blocks to constantly produce new cells. For that to happen, the cancer cell absolutely must reprogram the metabolic pathways of normal cells by upregulating a lot of biosynthetic enzymes."
A discussion of how a tumor acts like a newly born entity.
"This is actually a beautiful example of evolution," says Ruth Scherz-Shouval, a postdoctoral scientist in the Lindquist lab and first author of the Cell paper. "It's recognizing that the tumor is like an organism that adheres to evolutionary principles. HSF1 has been highly conserved over time, supporting the survival of organisms ranging from yeast to human, so it makes sense that it is co-opted here. Both cancer cells and the microenvironment are sensing changes in the tumor and responding, signaling to one another to help the "organism", albeit to the detriment of the host. These are different programs, but they're both controlled by HSF1 and serve the same purpose."
"During her first encounter with cancer, Susan Sontag described a tumor as a "demonic pregnancy." "This lump is alive," she wrote in "Illness as Metaphor," "a fetus with its own will." She could hardly know that the comparison would become more than a figure of speech."
"The Cancer Industry is in a "tumor tizzy". Most practitioners are so obsessed with shrinking the size of a tumor that they miss the mark completely. You see, chemotherapy does shrink tumors; that is true. However, despite the fact that oncologists are successfully able to shrink tumors, oftentimes the cancer patient still dies. But why? The reason is the tumor size has nothing to do with curing cancer. The tumor is like the "check engine" light in your car. It appears only after a problem has developed, but the light itself is not the problem. Do you smash the light, or do you attempt to fix the underlying problem? A tumor is just a signal that something has gone terribly wrong in the body...it is just the tip of the iceberg."
"We were surprised at how thin and fragile the blood vessels are in tumors," McDonald says. "The endothelium of tumor vessels is like plastic wrap, with holes that make it leaky."
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