[ note: contains adult discussions of sexual matters which some non-biologists may find offensive ] St. Peregrinus is the patron saint of those suffering from cancer but his connection to this blog goes deeper than that, and it's something that I've been meaning to write about. if the CRF Theory demands a loss of communication between cells as the initiator of cancer, what role would physical factors play? I've refrained from discussing this because the evidence is very anecdotal. But let's start with the saint. In penance for his actions, he spent 30 years preferring standing to sitting, and he ended up with varicosities of the leg and, eventually, cancer of the foot which was so bad that an amputation was scheduled* The caveat that makes cancer etiology so difficult is that rarely does a single factor produce cancer for even when a single factor has a causal relationship, there are some who do not succumb to it. Multiple factors enter into the equation--the patien...
A theory created to explain the fact that cancer cells turn back to normal when put in an embryo; it's called the cell recognition theory of cancer. Basically, a cell loses touch with its neighbor(s)or with the ECM. This releases the physical constraints on the nucleus which then cycles through earlier embryonic stages hoping to establish contact once again (it partially succeeds when it establishes a metastasis).