What is cancer?
Join group leader Gerard Evan as he explains why we get cancer and how science is unravelling this complex disease.
The second biggest killer of people in the world, cancer is caused by our very own cells replicating in an unregulated and inappropriate way.
The rapid replication of healthy cells is important to stay well and heal our wounds, but as our cells copy themselves, errors can happen. It’s through these errors that cancers can arise.
Despite cancer arising from such a common biological process, when you consider the enormous number of cells in our body, around 100 trillion, it’s amazingly rare that one of these cells will turn cancerous.
In this talk, Professor Gerard Evan explains what cancer is, why cancer is so difficult to treat and why some cancers can be so deadly for us.
Gerard Evan is a professor in cancer biology at King’s College London and a group leader of the Cancer Biology Lab at the Francis Crick Institute.
Crick Crash Courses started life as talks for our staff, to help everyone working here – scientists and non-scientists – better understand the Crick's discovery research into how life works.
We're now opening our doors to our crash course talks, giving everyone, everywhere the opportunity to hear directly from our scientists as they investigate some of the most complex challenges in human health.
