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Overview

Parasite Rex is about parasites, which are organisms that live on or inside another organism and get their food from the host. It’s a fascinating topic because it shows how important they are to our ecosystem. They’re also responsible for some of the most interesting evolutionary adaptations in nature.

Cancer is a disease that has been around for thousands of years, but we still don’t have a complete understanding of it. It’s an illness that affects many people and kills even more. This book explains how cancer cells are different from normal cells, as well as external factors that can cause them to grow out of control. Moreover, this book goes over the history of cancer treatments and research in order to help us better understand the disease.

In the following points, you’ll learn about how eternal youth is actually bad for our cells; why women’s jaws started to crumble after painting watches; and how a pathologist and a New York socialite changed cancer research.

Big Idea #1: Cancer has been around since ancient times, but we didn’t know much about it.

Ever heard the expression “balanced personality?” It might be used to describe a level-headed friend. However, around 400 BCE it was closely linked to Hippocrates, who believed that the human body had four humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. An excess of one humor would result in an illness or a personality problem. For example, a short-tempered person would have too much yellow bile.

Cancer has been studied for a long time. In ancient times, it was believed that cancer was caused by an excess of black bile in the body. This theory persisted well into medieval times and beyond.

However, autopsies were forbidden for religious reasons in the Middle Ages. This meant that there was no way to prove Galen’s theory until the sixteenth century. At this time, Vesalius and Baillie performed autopsies on cancer-riddled corpses and found that neither the tumors nor their bodies contained black bile.

Galen’s theory that black bile caused tumors was disproven. Many scientists then believed that invisible and poisonous vapors called miasmas led to cancer. Scientists also thought they had found these substances after examining “cancerous tissues” under microscopes, which resulted in the awarding of a Nobel Prize for proving roundworms cause stomach cancer (which is false).

So, early on, people thought cancer was caused by something in the body. Then we thought it was caused by external agents like air and water. Nowadays, we don’t think that at all.

Big Idea #2: Cancer is a disease in which abnormal cells grow out of control. These cancerous cells multiply very quickly and never die.

Today, the idea that cancer can be caused by invisible miasmas seems absurd. One pathologist decided to investigate this phenomenon using only what he could see under a microscope. This laid the foundations of our modern understanding of cancer.

Virchow’s cellular theory explained that every cell arises from another existing cell. He observed cells under a microscope and discovered that tumor tissue is made up of the body’s own cells. This led him to conclude that cancer tissue comes from our own cells.

Cancer cells are unique because they don’t die and they continue to replicate.

Usually, tissues regulate cell growth. They only divide if they receive signals from their environment and stop growing when there are inhibitors present. This is a crucial process because imagine what would happen if all the cells in your brain grew infinitely. Your head would grow to an impossibly large size!