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ThoughtfulPoster t1_j53cw2k wrote

Cancer is not a type of cell. It's a word for any type of cell that isn't listening to its programmed instructions to stop diving and die (apoptosis) after it stops being useful to the body. So, brain cells that become cancerous look like brain cells. Heart cells that become cancerous look like heart cells. And so on.

Your son is probably confused because we often show children pictures of soot-damaged lung tissue and talk about how smoking causes cancer, so it's easy to think that those pictures are "what cancer looks like." But no, cancer cells look like any other, usually.

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devinmacd t1_j53j7ds wrote

More so than lungs, he might be getting the black thing from skin and oral cancers, which can often look black, and would be the readily visible cancers. Also black tissue would be associated with necrotic, rotting, just nefarious in general so can see a kid thinking that. But true that in general cancer doesn't have a color.

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laulu_aino t1_j587xvq wrote

I was also thinking about necrosis as cancer can lead to necrotic tissue

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starliz t1_j53ipoh wrote

My cancerous tumor was a re-occurrence of melanoma. I was given a picture of it. It was pink, like the surrounding tissue.

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asap_einstein t1_j55m5nt wrote

Just fyi, this was most likely because of certain dyes that are used in patholgy labs. Cells by themselves are colourless unless they contain specific pigments - like black-ish melanocytes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%26E_stain

Hope that cancer is gone now.

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[deleted] t1_j55te2v wrote

[removed]

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asap_einstein t1_j55wf4w wrote

Seems like you are in the hands of capable clinicians - I simply wish you all the best.

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Spud_M314 t1_j56j7mm wrote

Natural selection selects for critters to hide from predators, analogous to cancer cells hiding from the innate immune system...

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Richie196 t1_j55rl6j wrote

Stains for antibodies associated with various cancers also stain black after Immunohistochemistry stains and can give this impression.

Especially considering that most finished stains in Pathology are very colorful.

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MythologicalMayhem t1_j54i7n2 wrote

Also when you look at very advanced breast cancer, some parts are black, I'm assuming from possible necrosis.

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freddythedinosaur1 t1_j551jwo wrote

So how do surgeons tell cancerous apart from non cancerous when trying to remove cancer? Is it just that cancerous cells (despite looking like normal cells) combine into differently shaped tissue? (Like "lumps"?)

And also how come skin cancer often shows up in "spots" that are differently colored than one's skin?

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Bag-Weary t1_j55a9ne wrote

Surgeons are guided by imaging devices like PET, CT and MRI scanners. You can use contrast agents to show areas of greater glucose metabolism, for instance, as cancer cells use energy faster than others for respiration and blood vessel construction, and draw a contour around that to be used in surgery and radiotherapy.

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bobbi21 t1_j55c1gj wrote

Physician here. As others have said, Usually through scans and different tools but visually, youre right, its often a "lump" the architecture of tumours are almost always off from normal tissue. Its just rapidly dividing cells going any which way so more often its just a lump. There is often tumour spreading away from that lump too which is harder to see so they cant just go by that of course.

A common skin cancer is melanoma, and those are made specifically from the pigment producing cells in the skin, so they would be hyper pigmented and often dark. Squamous cell and basal cell skin cancers can be any colour really.

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DanelleDee t1_j55pjlr wrote

They don't actually look like normal cells. Benign tumors do. Cancerous tumors, while still the same color as the tissue they originated from, usually exhibit a bunch of characteristics that are easy to see on a sample under a microscope. That's why biopsies are a common part of cancer diagnosis. After a surgery, the removed tumors borders are examined. There should be healthy cells on all edges to ensure the entire cancerous mass was removed. This might even be done before the patient is closed back up! Cancer cells are a variety of sizes and shapes rather than uniform; they are immature, often looking like cells from an embryo rather than a person who has been born; they lose their specialized features that allow them to do whatever their function is; they have multiple large nuclei (the part of the cell that holds DNA,) and that DNA is tangled; they contain less fluid; they have more blood supply growing, and they aren't attached properly to each other or surrounding tissues.

And skin cancer might appear darker because your skin is made of different types of cells. If the pigment producing cell (melanocyte, the cell that gives your skin it's color) is the cancerous one, you get a bunch of pigmented cells clustered together and it's darker than the surrounding skin cells that don't make pigment.

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dafaceofme t1_j557cka wrote

not a surgeon/medical provider

From what I've heard, a tumor looks/feels different from normal tissue. Dr. Sandra Lee (aka Dr Pimple Popper) has a few videos on lipomas (a non-cancerous tumor) and I believe at least one has an explanation.

I don't know the answer to your question regarding skin cancers, with the exception of melanoma, which is a cancer of the pigment-producing cells in your skin. This makes it very easy to differentiate on lighter-skinned folks as it is physically darker than the surrounding normal skin.

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TheNoobtologist t1_j57gum3 wrote

Cancer cells often do look different than the originating tissue, and can have distinct histologic markers on the microscope.

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jennlara OP t1_j550j0f wrote

Yes thank you! I told him that gangrene is black, but I didn’t think cancer was. So when he asked what color it would be I was stumped.

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brokendrumsticks t1_j54d7bj wrote

What colours are brain, heart, liver, etc cells normally?

I recently started wondering this because someone said “liver coloured” and I think they meant the purple that livers are usually coloured in text books. I realised books have standard colours for organs and now we think those are the colours but obviously they are just for clarity

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HermitAndHound t1_j54qzig wrote

Most organs consist of more than one cell type. Fatty tissue is white to yellow. Muscle cells are red meat, looks the same in all mammals. As the heart is a muscle too, it's mostly red, with a bit of fat around it, and some shimmering white to almost silver connective tissue. Fasciae in general are really pretty. The single fiber is white, but in smooth organized sheets they can shimmer like pearl in pale rainbow colors.

White blood cells are translucent, only the red blood cells are actually red, platelets are yellow. White blood cells climb around in almost all tissues, so even a red muscle has some of those, and yellow-ish nerve fibers and the red-grey-white of blood vessels, it's a mix.

When you put any cell under a microscope most of them are translucent and barely visible. There are a bunch of organelles inside, filled with whatever this cell's product/purpose is. That's where the color comes from. Like chloroplasts in plant cells, just those are green, the rest is translucent. Few cells are so colorful that it's noticeable when you look at just one. The sheer mass of them makes organs as colorful as they are.

To really tell things apart the cells are dyed. There are different dyes/stains that attach to different parts of a cell. They even come in fluorescent. Some are as simple as binding to anything acidic or basic, others cling to just one specific molecule. Without dye it's hard to impossible to tell what is what.

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BluePlankton t1_j54ptoz wrote

Pretty much every part of the body has a colour some where along a spectrum between a yellowish off white to a dark, almost blackish red. Textbook images of cells from different organs will have been stained with different dyes to make the cell organelles more clear. The most common stain will probably be the H&E stain which makes everything look pink and purple.

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kenetha65 t1_j55aak0 wrote

Don't some cancer cells undifferentiate?

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[deleted] t1_j560p7h wrote

I believe this is the main way to identify cancer cells. They become undifferentiated and lose the appearance and function the cell originally had.

Edit: typo

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MrMorgus t1_j561pfy wrote

I've seen a sample of al dental tumor cells being metastasised into a kidney. Yes, those were actual molars growing out of a kidney. Those cells were pretty white.

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ScrollWithTheTimes t1_j5666wj wrote

I always assumed they'd be white because that's how they look on a scan, but then I watched a documentary where they autopsied a cancer victim on camera (yes, really) and was surprised when the tumours didn't look noticeably different from the surrounding tissue. But you're right, when you think about what cancer actually is, why would they look different?

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