How cancer starts: how a normal cell turns into cancer
How chemotherapy works, and why it makes hair fall out
The first modern chemotherapy drug, tested in 1942, was a cousin of a poison gas from the First World War. Why can a drug that harms healthy cells too still shrink a tumour, and why does it make hair fall out?
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Surgery takes out a tumour that stays in one place, like Rono's mole. Cancer cells that have spread are harder to reach. For them, doctors use drugs that travel through the blood to the whole body.
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The first of these drugs was tested in 1942, in the United States, on a man with a cancer of his lymph nodes, the small glands of the immune system. It was a cousin of mustard gas, a poison of the First World War. His tumours shrank.
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