Question: How do people get cancer?

Vera Weisbecker answered on 22 Jun 2011:

Getting cancer is usually quite a slow process of several mutations accumulating in the same cell, because our body is pretty good at shutting down cells that show signs of turning “bad”. It works roughly like this: imagine a gut cell that first gets a mutation to not listen to the body’s signals as to went to divide. Because gut cells divide fairly quickly anyway, soon you ahve many cells that have this mutation. The body recognizes that there is one thing wrong with these cells and keeps them “in check” anyway. But then another mutation pops up that makes the cells divide much faster, and another that stops the body from controlling the numbers of these cells. That is when you get cell growth that goes out of control, and a tumor forms.