Question: "How do you get cancer?"

Oliver George answered on 19 Jun 2014:

Cancer is a difficult disease to understand.

The simplest explanation of what cancer is would be that cells are reproducing at the wrong time and in the wrong place. There are loads of things that can increase the risk of cancer (like smoking, being overweight, age and many other things I haven’t space to list) but all these things really do is cause mistakes in the cells DNA.

If you think of a new box of Lego, it comes with a clear set of instructions of how to build the kit. DNA is basically instructions for the cell. When you get mistakes in the DNA the cell is no longer able to understand important parts of the instructions. It would be like trying to follow what the Lego instructions said if all the important words were in ancient Greek.

The body is actually quite good at picking out cells which have got jumbled instructions and usually gets rid of them before they can cause any problems. Unfortunately the body sometimes misses them and this is what leads to cancer. Scientists and doctors are getting better at working out what can lead to cancer though which means that it is getting easier to avoid.

I hope this answers your question. It was quite a hard one! :p