Cancer brings up the fear of a growing mass traveling through the whole body causing slow unpleasant death. Indeed, it is becoming one of the biggest killer this century. Molecular science brings a whole new light to this dreaded disease. The changes in the genes are passed down through generations, and new ones are created long before we are aware of the growing tumor. In fact these same molecular changes lead to aging and many of our common chronic diseases. More importantly during the current pandemic, your immunity to covid infection is shaped by your molecular health.
This new concept is called molecular ecology. The gazillion molecules in your cells and organs can act independently and as a whole, a molecular ecological system. For example, each molecular reaction has a negative feedback and repeated in all molecules within the cell, leads to homeostasis, a condition where allows best life functions. The principle of homeostasis and molecular evolution, which follows the principles of Darwinian natural selection, are a few concepts that help the understanding of molecular pathways in development of cancer and other diseases.
Prevention of cancer or other diseases is an old practice and much improved by molecular medicine. The benefits are clear for the individual and also for society. Interestingly, molecular medicine not only reinforces the old concepts of good nutrition and physical activity, but also provide new tools to monitor our own molecular ecology. The unified concept of health and disease through molecular biology, also extends to our apparent outside environment. What happens to our global environment impacts our very survival as a species, and little did we know that in ourselves we carry a little of the outside world, namely the microbiome we have in our gut, around our skin, and in our respiratory tract. Yes, corona viruses has been around and in us for centuries, however the new zoonotic virus has more lessons and challenges for us.