[escapee]

Originally Posted by Addict

Also I wanted to comment on your question 'Why are only grown-ups the most affected?' Now, I'm no expert by any means, but I have read a bit about genetics. I think the reason is that as our cells divide, they have a tendency to mutate and mutations cause cancer. As the genetic data keeps getting passed around, like a game of telephone, it gets more and more unstable, so the older you are, the more likely you are to have these harmful mutations. One of the most interesting things that I have read about is the Telomere, which from what I understand, simply acts a buffer in the DNA. It was explained as the border around a sheet of paper. If you put that paper through a copy machine, sometimes the copies are misaligned. The border, which is useless whitespace, acts as the buffer. It also has something to do with cancer, but I don't know enough to explain it:

Telomere

To answer the question about the role of Gene mutation on cancer

Regarding the huge effort to explain cancer with genetics, Dr. Robert A. Weinberg of M.I.T., discoverer of the so-called oncogene
(cancer-causing genes), and one of the world’s leading cancer researchers, reversed his conclusions after discovering that, “[F]ewer
than one DNA base in a million appears to have been miscopied.” It’s not enough of a defect!6 His exact words, “…Something was
very wrong. The notion that a cancer developed through the successive activation of a series of oncogenes [cancer-causing genes]
had lost its link to reality.” Dr. Weinberg reversed his opinion; calling the genetic discoveries made thus far, “sterile”—the prime cause
of cancer is therefore not “genetic.” This was in 998. Did you hear it? Probably not. In 2006, the heads of the world’s largest cancer
research center in Houston, Texas (USA) know cancer’s prime cause isn’t genetic: “‘If it could have happened [solving cancer with
genetics], it would have already happened with genetic mutations,’ said William Brinkley, a senior vice-president at Baylor who says
other research should take precedence over the cancer genome project…. Dr. John Mendelsohn [president of M.D. Anderson Cancer
Center] states, ‘Any claims that this [genetic research] is going to be the key to curing cancer are not appropriate.’” Thus, the prime
cause of cancer is not a genetic mutation.

http://www.brianpeskin.com/NEXUS%20H...%20Article.pdf



Warburg's hypothesis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Warburg articulated this hypothesis (meanwhile named 'Warburg's hypothesis') as a paper entitled The Prime Cause and Prevention of Cancer which he presented in lecture at the meeting of the Nobel-Laureates on June 30, 1966 at Lindau, Lake Constance, Germany. In this speech, Warburg presented evidence in support of the claim that anaerobiosis was a primary cause of cancerous cells. Put in his own words, "the prime cause of cancer is the replacement of the respiration of oxygen in normal body cells by a fermentation of sugar." [1]

In recent years, Warburg's hypothesis re-gained significant attention amongst scientists due to several discoveries linking impaired mitochondrial function as well as impaired respiration to growth, division and expansion of cancer cells. Warburg's hypothesis was essentially confirmed by Michael Ristow's lab by demonstrating that various cancer cells almost completely lose their ability to grow and to form tumors simply by re-instating mitochondrial respiration. Subsequent work has shown that this observation, indeed, might be a promising approach in the treatment of cancer

PubMed Home

The hallmarks of cancer growth, increased glycolysis and lactate production in tumors, have raised attention recently due to novel observations suggesting a wide spectrum of oxidative phosphorylation deficits and decreased availability of ATP associated with malignancies and tumor cell expansion. The most recent findings suggest that forcing cancer cells into mitochondrial metabolism efficiently suppresses cancer growth, and that impaired mitochondrial respiration may even have a role in metastatic processes.