Submitted by jennlara t3_10gjb3t in askscience
My family and I were talking and my son (9) said he thinks that cancer is always black. I told him that I didn’t think it would be black but couldn’t tell him what color it really is. So we are wondering, what color would cancer cells be?
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.