A
recent scientific study concluded that of hundreds of examined
Egyptian mummies, the vast majority had no sign of
cancerous conditions. Such conditions have, in more recent times, steadily grown so that they now end up afflicting about
one third of Americans and a similar number of people in
England, as well as comparable numbers of folks from other industrialised nations. The conclusion drawn from this inquiry was that modern cancer rates must be reflective of some circumstances of the modern world.
The study has no dearth of
critics arguing that the mummies were probably from people who died too young to have developed cancer -- and yet, the researchers noted that the mummies
did show other age-related disease indicators, like
hardened arteries and
osteoporosis.
View from a step back:
Let us step back, then, and ask ourselves why this might have come about, and what if anything we may
do about it. Cells divide constantly, as the unimaginably tiny molecular machines called
organelles, living in respectable numbers within the cells themselves, read the
DNA encoded at the cell
nucleus and using the molecular raw materials derived mostly from what we eat to construct copies based on that
blueprint -- copies including a copy of the blueprint itself, a replicated strand of DNA. But there are copying errors from time to time, though mostly harmless. This is, veritably, the precise function that leads to sometimes-
evolutionary change when such
copying errors occur in combination with
reproduction of the entire
animal, and not just in its mundane bodily cells.
But there are occasions wherein a particular bad sort of copying error in cell reproduction leads to the cell becoming malignant, unable to serve its normal function and harmful to the body which contains it. And those cells continue to divide, and divide, and divide, and the DNA errors contained within them propagate and are even
transferred to other cells, different kinds of cells, allowing some cancers to spread throughout the body and destroy the various systems which the body depends upon for its very
survival!!
The pollution/cancer connection:
Which brings us to
carcinogens -- substances found in our environment which, for whatever reason, attack our DNA's self replicating capacity and make it vastly more likely that this process will go awry with the most devastating and deadly results. Another moment's reflection of
evolutionary biology is appropriate here: those who deny
evolution by natural selection may ignore this
message, even at the massive cost of human life that is the price of such
ignorance. But for the rest of you, you know the human body (like all modern life forms) is the product of billions of years of evolution occurring in tune with the environment which we are adapted to thrive within, and millions of years of that process just within the vaguely human antecedents which gave rise to us. Nature could not know, nor could it foresee, that eventually we would introduce strange new substances into our surroundings, chemical amalgams which evolution could have in no way prepared our must fundamental structures to cope with.
Whatever the evidence of the mummies is taken to mean, it may hardly be straightfacedly denied that it is our pollution of the world which may be spawning our self-destruction, inflicting an ever-expanding proportion of cancerous circumstances upon mankind. Consider our unnatural exposure to
gasoline and the fumes of its combustion; our strange dependence on plastics and their unnatural formulation; our interposition into the foods we eat of all manner of chemically concocted preservatives and additives and stuffers and fillers. I don't mean to exploit emotions, but I wish to emphasise the seriousness of this in pointing out that one of our beloved contributors here is fighting cancer. We
all know someone in our larger circle of family or friends who has cancer, or has had cancer, maybe beat it, maybe died from it, or who will have cancer. If we are unable to face up to the truth of this horror, we will all eventually die from cancer, and our children will die from cancer, and coming generations of the human race will shrivel into the dust in the face of it. The only surprise here is that it took some scientists this long to point out what ought to be obvious in this age. It's time to really
ask the question. It's time to
do something about it.