termsTerm
Cell
aka cells, cellular
The smallest living unit of the body. You are made of roughly 30 trillion of them, and cancer begins when one of them starts dividing when it should not.
Each cell is a membrane-bound compartment with a nucleus holding the DNA, machinery for reading genes and building proteins, and receptors on its surface for sensing the outside world. Cells in a tissue normally divide only when instructed and die when damaged or no longer needed; cancer is the breakdown of that discipline in one cell lineage. Almost every treatment on this site is an attempt to kill cancer cells, stop them dividing, or help immune cells find them, while sparing normal cells that share most of the same machinery.
Category
Biology basics