Until now, the only way to diagnose cancer definitively was to cut out tissue and find cancer cells under a microscope. Cancer is not caused by an overproduction of cells. Normal cells live only so long and then die. 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.
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. To cure cancer, all we have to do is destroy telomerase without destroying the cell, so cancer cells can die and a person infected with cancer can live. In the near future, doctors should be able to diagnose cancer by testing for telomerase and they should be able to cure cancer by destroying telomerase.