Madrid
Updated:
Keep
In the time that a television interview lasts, the journalist Julia Otero did more to spread cancer than hundreds of articles and thoughtful explanations over the years. Otero arrived on the set of El Hormiguero and told how his eleven months of treatment were. His interview became one of the best seen on the Pablo Motos program. The success was not only what counted, but how he did it: unsweetened, clearly and even humorously at times.
She talked about her diagnosis, her fears about her treatment and how she became just another oncology patient. But he also gave a lesson in the biology of cancer: how it develops, develops and spreads by colonizing other organs.
I speak of selfish, immortal and traveling cells, to explain the genesis and metastasis of tumors. It was not just a metaphor, but the title of the professor’s last book of Biochemistry of the University of Oviedo, Carlos López-Otín where the keys to cancer and its new treatments are offered. He made the explanation his own and recommended the scientist’s book that in just a few days has become number 1 in sales and has sold out on Amazon, the online sales giant. All profits will go to the Spanish Association Against Cancer.
The book is part of a trilogy in which Carlos López-Otín talks about life and human vulnerability. And cancer is still that black beast that medicine tries to tame to which he has dedicated his latest work.
The scientist who divides cancer cells as selfish, immortal and traveler is also one of the ten European researchers with the greatest impact in the analysis of the molecular secrets of cancer. In his book he explains how this disease causes cellular transformation, by virtue of which a normal cell becomes a selfish entity that grows without restraint, immortal who ignores the signs of death received by damaged cells and traveler, able to leave its fabric of origin and colonize other territories to form metastases.
The radio journalist knows well the work of Carlos López-Otínand it is one of the people he turned to to get to know his illness up close. As he told Pablo Motos during the interview, he wanted to know at all times what is cancer, what was your type of cancer like, what is chemo…. “There are people who choose ignorance out of fear, I chose to ask everything.” (…) When I entered the box (to undergo chemotherapy) I concentrated and apologized to my good cells. He apologized to them because they were going to suffer a lot because the treatment seeks to damage the malignant cells but damages the good cells, which have behaved well, which have complied with their cellular clock,” he said with extreme simplicity.
The same with which López-Otín also explains why humanity will be unable to get rid of cancer. “As long as there is life there will be cancer because it is part of our essence. The miraculous thing is not having cancer.
www.abc.es
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism