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Showing posts from February, 2015

Can cancer even be cured?

You’ve all heard the common refrain, “Refrain from smoking lest you develop cancer”. These days, everything we do can be a cause for cancer – eating spicy food, using air conditioners, eating fried food, consuming liquor, passive smoking, being exposed to UV rays and a host of other things as well. And the worst part is, even if you remained a teetotaller, stayed indoors, ate only fruits and generally kept away from popularly categorized carcinogens, you still could develop cancer. I recently read an article on endogenous retroviruses – something that we, as a race, have been carrying for a few million years now (even before the dawn of “mankind” as we know it). Basically these are sequences of DNA in our somatic and germ cells (read body cells and sperms/ova) which were once infectious retroviruses that plagued our primeval counterparts. For all those unaware of the mechanisms of infection of retroviruses – they are viruses that are able to integrate their genetic material into t