Elizabeth Blackburn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2009. Along with colleagues, she was instrumental in discovering the mechanisms that enables cancer to grow.

Once healthy cells, cancerous cells lose the control mechanisms that keep them contributing productively to the ecosystem that enables them to live and flourish.

Cancerous cells become overzealous and believe they are more important than the whole. They end up spreading and killing the entire ecosystem that feeds them and eventually killing themselves as a consequence.