Fear to Fail

Treating Cancer: Surgery about 90% of cancer patients undergoes some kind of surgery. These viruses are segments of nucleic acids, DNA or RNA themselves, thought to have "escaped" from normal cellular DNA or RNA. If the radiation dose is high enough, repair enzymes cannot keep up with the damage, and mutations will accumulate where the dimers have formed, resulting in potentially permanent changes in the DNA. If repairs cannot be made, the cell may self-destruct. Other methods of treatment are commonly used alongside it. The p53 gene was originally discovered in 1979 by Arnold Levine.

When a cell's DNA is badly damaged, a gene known as p53 begins to direct an emergency response by turning on several hundred genes. If the mutated cells do not die, they may become transformed and eventually cause cancer. Now, researchers have found one of the first proteins produced in this chain of command. When mutated, it loses its protective function; this allows mutations to accumulate in other genes and leads to more than 50 percent of all human cancers, including cancers of the colon, breast, lung, bladder, brain, and liver. p53 is actually a tumor suppressor, and that it is altered in the majority of colon cancers. Since then, mutant forms of p53 have cropped up in so many tumors and aroused so much interest that Science hailed the p53 protein as the "Molecule of the Year" in 1993. Viruses can inflict damage by inserting themselves into the DNA of an appropriate host cell, also known as its "genome", to cause cancer.