• Question: Who was the person who discovered cancer?

    Asked by lottie123 to Amar, Ana, Andrea, Leah, Matt on 11 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by wilcoxo11, cupcake94, blackcat, tylerk, shamail155, icecream19, , .
    • Photo: Anastasia Wass

      Anastasia Wass answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      I don’t know! Cancers been known about for a very long time so I’m not sure who was first. Hippocrates was the person who first named it though.

    • Photo: Matthew Lam

      Matthew Lam answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      I don’t know either…may be difficult to put it down to one person but as Anastasia said, the Greek scientist/philosopher Hippocrates named the disease cancer.

    • Photo: Andrea Hanvey

      Andrea Hanvey answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      Yes Ana and Matt are right

    • Photo: Amar Joshi

      Amar Joshi answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      Cancer was discovered a long long time ago so no one knows who discovered it, but the ancient Greeks and Romans knew about it.

      However lots of research has been going on about cancer for a long time. One of the earliest nobel prizes was given to Otto Warburg for doing research on cancer. He found that cancers leave a particular metabolic finger print which can help identify cancer.

    • Photo: Leah Fitzsimmons

      Leah Fitzsimmons answered on 12 Mar 2014:

      No-one can be said to have discovered cancer because it has probably always existed, possibly even before humans fully evolved – although because we don’t have anything apart from bones to look at it is hard to prove this.

      Also, cancer is not one disease, but lots of diseases that all have certain things in common – like how they can grow continuously and not be killed by the body’s in-built defence systems. Once the word cancer had started to be used for some types of tumours, soon people began to use the word for other unexplained diseases that also grew and behaved in the same way.

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