Kurt Goldstein: "Life is a condition alternating between excitation, destruction and unbalance, and reorganization, equilibrium and rest."
Oncological pathologists, looking at slices of a tumor, believe they can guess when the cells have an evil intention. However, biologists studying living cells find that cells can do only what they are allowed to do by their environment.
Cancer: Disorder and Energy According to the World Health Organization, cancer is now the leading cause of death in the world. Although many "causes" are known, and despite the "War on Cancer," nothing practical has been done to reduce the incidence of cancer. Since Nixon started that war, the number of people dying annually in the US has increased faster than the population. In ancient Rome and Egypt, cancer was rare; cancer has been identified in only one Egyptian mummy. In the US and several other countries, between 2002 and 2005 there was an unprecedented decline (7% in the US) in the incidence of breast cancer, when the medical use of estrogen decreased following the Women's Health Initiative report showing that estrogen caused cancer, dementia, strokes and heart attacks. However, when the public was reassured about estrogen's safety, breast cancer incidence began increasing again each year. The cancer industry has been flexible and imaginative in ways of presenting "age standardized" death rates to show that they are making progress against cancer, but there are philosophical and scientific problems in "oncology" (i.e., the study or treatment of lumps) that should be considered by anyone who plans to do business with that profession. In the 19th century (in Johannes Muller's lab), cancers, like other animal tissues, were found to be made up of cells, and by 1858, all diseases were said to be caused by disturbances in cells (Rudolph Virchow). The atomic and molecular theory of matter was becoming accepted at the time that animals were found to be made up of cells, and in both cases the "elementary particles" seemed to have a special power to explain things. This idea of a cellular basis of disease gradually displaced the old idea that diseases were caused by an imbalance of the body fluids, or humors. In 1863, Virchow recognized that inflammation, involving leukocytes, was a common feature of cancer, but that aspect of his work was neglected for a long time. Recent medical textbooks reveal no major change in the understanding of cancer since Virchow's time, except that "genes" (which weren't known during Virchow's life) gradually became the most important aspect of cells. The typical modern textbook describes the cellular disturbance of cancer as the result of an "initiating" mutation in a gene, which gives it the potential to develop into a cancer, if it subsequently is exposed to a "promoter," which causes it to multiply. In some versions of the theory, a promoter is a second mutation that causes proliferation, but in other versions the promotion is caused by chemicals binding to receptors the way hormones do, to stimulate proliferation. Typically, textbooks (and reports of continuing research) describe subsequent changes in the genes that cause a cancer to progress from a simple excess of cells through stages of increasing malignancy: hyperplasia, dysplasia, carcinoma in situ, invasive cancer. One of the reasons that the medical understanding of cancer hasn't changed significantly since Virchow's time is that blaming misbehaving cells for causing a tumor fits into the older medical tradition, that has existed at least since the time of Hippocrates, 400 BC, which treated tumors either by cutting them out, or by burning them off with caustics. Virchow's identification of misbehaving cells provided a clear mental image of exactly what the physician must try to destroy. And it's probably hard to get interested in something which could seriously limit your professional activities if it turned out to be true. The "cellular basis of cancer" was developed simultaneously with the germ theory of disease, and in the case of cancer, the deviant cells came to be considered an alien substance, "not-self," analogous to infective germs. Paul Ehrlich's search for poisons that were specific for bacterial pathogens was quickly extended to the idea of finding poisons that would distinguish between cancer cells and the patient's cells. Hippocrates' therapeutic approach to cancer may have survived for 2400 years, but the ideas of his younger contemporary, Plato, about order and causation have probably had a greater effect on medicine. Plato believed that the world of experience is inferior and accidental, and that there are timeless "Forms" that are the real substances. In the atomic theory of matter, eternal, unchanging atoms took the place of platonic forms, and there are still molecular biologists who insist that life can only be explained in terms of its constituent atoms ("What else is there but atoms?"). This philosophy of timeless forms was a deep commitment of people like Gregor Mendel and August Weismann, whose ideas dominated the thinking of early 20th century geneticists. Genes were the immutable essence of organisms, and the cells, tissues, and organs that form the organism are merely temporal and accidental. Weismann's "germ plasm" or germ line contained the immortal genes, the rest of the body lacked them, and was essentially mortal. For most of the 20th century, the official doctrine was that most of the cells of the adult body became stationary once the body reached its adult size, and that aging consisted of the "wearing out" of those mortal cells. When a tumor, containing new cells, would appear and grow, these cells were called "immortal," because they didn't follow the rule for normal, stationary, mortal cells. Their "immortality" is often demonstrated by growing them endlessly in culture dishes. Normal cells, if they can be made to survive in a culture dish, are likely to be "transformed" into cancer, demonstrated by their ability to replicate in dishes.