Cancer cells live forever and become so numerous that they invade other tissues. Cancer cells eventually invade and kill normal cells that are necessary for life and the victim dies. For example, if you have cancer of the kidney, the kidney cells can become so numerous that they invade and grow in your lungs. This prevents your lungs from processing oxygen and you smother to death. The kidney cancer cells could invade your bones and cause them to break.
Cells pass on their genetic material to newly formed cells through their chromosomes.
You have brown hair because your mother or father gave you the gene on the chromosome for brown hair. Normal cells split to make two cells, but before they split, they duplicate each chromosome so they can send one chromosome to each new cell. However, normal human cells do not know how to duplicate the tips of chromosomes, so with each division, a chromosome loses a part of its end, called a telomere, until eventually it loses enough of the end to cause the chromosomes to stick to each other and die. Dr. Victoria Lundblad of Baylor University Medical School discovered the main protein enzyme that makes telomerase. The next step in a cure for cancer is to learn how to block the enzyme that makes telomerase.