I’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of $1000 to communicate their work.
Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
This zone is the Organs Zone. It has scientists studying health and disease in various parts  of our bodies. Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
Great question!
The reason that it is so hard is because all the cancers of the body are different. For example, breast cancer is very different to skin cancer.
There are lots of things that are similar about them, too, which means that we can treat them similarly, for example, the cells of most cancers grow fast, which means that we can treat them with radiotherapy and chemotherapy which both kill fast-growing cells.
But most often, we don’t know what actually starts the different types of cancers growing in the first place. When we know this, hopefully it will be easier to cure them.
We have learnt a lot in the last 40 years tho. We know that there are kinds of drugs or poisons that cause cancer, and we have been able to stop people getting cancer from these by stopping people using them. We also know that the UV rays from the sun cause skin cancer, and if everyone was sun safe, we could drastically reduce the amount of skin cancer.
We are getting much better at preventing cancer from starting, which is all part of challenge. we won’t need to cure it if people don’t get it in the first place!
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Hi tizzy and jradford- this is a great question and answered excellently by Hannah.
Cancer is actually many different diseases with similarities as Hannah described (the cells divide rapidly and uncontrollably- without a stop button!) but also with many differences (and which differ between individuals! – some treatments which successfully treat cancer in one person may not work as well in another person!)
There are thousands of researchers around the world studying different types of cancers and trying to find specific ways to prevent/cure the cancer from spreading.
One thing’s for sure, cancer is a very complex group of diseases and there are lots of people working really hard at trying to find a way to prevent, treat and stop the spread.
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Simple answer, there’s too many different types of cancer. Each individual cancer has different cell types that are cancerous. Another level of complexity is that even if cancer cells can be removed, if the environment (where the cells live) has changed to a “cancerous environment” any cells that replace those you’ve removed will then replicate out of control and form a cancer.
So what we scientists need to do, is painstakingly find what cells/environments are involved/have changed in cancers and find a way to specifically target / influence them to stop cancer. That’s not easy at all!
Hope that makes sense 😀
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Cancer cells are actually your own cells that aren’t behaving properly. It’s hard to get rid of something that your body recognizes as its own!
Plus all the other reasons that everyone has given. It’s a very complex disease!
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