The Aging Healthfully Virtual Library - The Works of Majid Ali, M.D.
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Oxidative Theory of Cancer
From The Book RDA: Rats, Drugs and Assumptions

PART 4
AN OXYPHILE TURNS INTO AN OXYPHOBE

   Each cell has the biochemical machinery for behaving as a cancer cell. Each cancer cell has the capacity for "normalizing" its behavior. What is the evidence for my viewpoint?
    A cancer cell is an aerobic healthy cell before it becomes a predominantly anaerobic cell---as a result of oxidative injury to its DNA, DNA repair enzymes and possibly some regulatory proteins according to my theory presented here. How does it happen?
    In The Canary and Chronic Fatigue, I describe the evolution on aerobic (oxygen-utilizing) microbes from earlier anaerobic (nonoxygen-utilizing) life forms. The later aerobic microbes retain the DNA necessary for anaerobic existence of their predecessors. Thus, all an oxygen-utilizing cell requires to switch into a nonoxygen-utilizing mode is a reversion to its primitive mode. Does this ever happen? Of course it does! A common example of this phenomenon is when a colon cancer cells reverts back to its earlier form, recalls a forgotten memory and begins to make CEA---carcinoembyonic antigen material used to diagnose colon and other cancers. Another common example of this phenomenon is when well-differentiated cancers lose their differentiation and become de-differentiated. Ontogeny follow phylogeny is the common scientific expression for such regression.
    What turns a healthy "oxyphile" cell into a oxyphobe? Oxidative injury. I consider this a logical and inescapable conclusion drawn from a vast body of experimental and clinical data and my strong intuitive sense about it.

Cancer is Reversible

        Why do cancer cells develop a strong negative charge? This simple question arose in my mind sometime ago. Evidently it can happen in two ways: 1) Cancer cell membranes accumulate negatively charged electrons in response to changes in their environment; and 2) They do so in response to metabolic changes taking place within them, such as speeded-up anaerobic metabolism that increases acidotic stress and excessive production of hydrogen peroxide. Since free-floating cancer cells metastasize freely---multiply and flourish---in otherwise healthy tissues, it seems probable that the strong negative charge develops on the surface of the cancer cell in order to provide a counterbalance to the strong positive charge within it.
    Next came the expected question: If reversal of a strong negative surface charge results in tumor regression, it is not clear evidence that the cell innards might also respond to changes in the surface charge? In other words, cancer is a reversible phenomenon. This provides additional challenge to the prevailing dogma that cancer is caused by mutated genes, and that genes, once mutated, cannot become "unmutated." Slowly the concept evolved in my mind that cancer represents abnormal growth and replication behavior of the cell in response to changes in its electromagnetic and biochemical micro-environment---and that such abnormal growth behavior is reversible if the micro-environmental factors that caused it to become errant are removed.