Cancer isn't one disease but hundreds, and at its root it's a problem of control: a cell that stops obeying the rules that keep a body working as a team, and starts dividing when it shouldn't. We explain what actually goes wrong inside a cancer cell, why it's fundamentally a disease of our own genes, why it becomes more likely as we age, and what modern treatments are really trying to do.

You'll come away understanding the difference between a benign lump and a malignant one, why cancer is so hard to cure, how mutations accumulate, and why immunotherapy represents a genuinely new way of fighting it. This episode is a general explanation and isn't medical advice.

Talking Science is sponsored by Kinsoft. Visit www.kinsoft.com.au

Further reading: Cancer ...