IMAGINE a factory so large that it rivals the size of the Vatican.
This is the Lego factory in Monterrey, Mexico.
Here, over 25 billion Lego bricks are produced each year.
That’s about 50,000 Lego pieces every minute.
To make sure that nobody flings their Lego set across the living room in frustration, there is an exhaustive quality control process.
This involves something called precision moulding that ensures there is no size difference greater than 0.002 millimetres between bricks.
Additionally, there are automated quality checks, manual inspections, material testing, stress testing, environmental testing and of course, customer feedback.
The largest Lego sculpture ever made with these bricks was the 13-metre-high LEGO version of London’s Tower Bridge.
It took five months to build using 5,805,846 individual pieces.
Similarly, our bodies are made up of types of Lego blocks called cells.
Inside each of us, there are about 36 trillion of these cells.
It is estimated that every day, we make about 330 billion.
This equates to 3.8 million cells dividing every single second.
To look at this another way, this is about 4,560 cells for every one Lego block made in Mexico.
Now, two Lego blocks can stick together and make fun shapes, but our body’s cells can do more than 5,000 different jobs.
Inside us, we also have quality control measures to make sure that no cells with mistakes sneak through to cause us problems.
In fact, at the rate our cells divide, there are errors happening all the time.
However, our bodies have great ways of finding and getting rid of them.
Fundamentally, cancer happens when a serious error in one of our cells sneaks through and then manages to escape our own quality control systems.
Let’s imagine that one Monday morning, the managing director of the Monterrey Lego factory walks into their office.
Switching on the computer, they find an email that says something unexpected has happened elsewhere in the world.
The factory now needs to produce 100,000 blocks per minute instead of 50,000 blocks.
Smoking makes our quality control teams less able to do their jobs.
Now, how do you think the factory’s existing quality control system will manage this?
Will it be able to keep every block the exact size and specifications, or is there a higher chance that a few errors will slip through unnoticed?
Let’s make the situation worse.
On top of the doubling of demand for blocks, the quality control team have caught the flu and half of them are out sick.
What are the chances of the factory keeping the errors from making their way through to the final product now?
Our bodies must deal with similar challenges.
Let’s take a few examples. When we smoke, the chemicals damage cells throughout our body.
There are probably very few ways of better distributing chemicals around our bodies than to inhale them - it’s incredibly effective.
The body’s repair system then results in a doubling of our cell turnover. Additionally, the chemicals in the cigarettes make our quality control teams less able to do their jobs.
It’s a simple fact - smoking increases the risk of cancer by about 10 times.
For this privilege, the average smoker annually gives a cigarette company (that couldn’t care less about us) the equivalent of paying off a €27,000 five-year car loan.
Similarly, injuries like repeated sunburn cause our cells to divide quicker to repair the damage.
The sun’s rays also affect how well our quality control systems work.
There are certain infections that can do the same. I once passed two people talking.
One asked the other, ‘so will you get the vaccine?’, lighting his cigarette, the second replied, ‘no, you just don’t know what they put in those things…’
The overall result of things that damage our cells and impair our quality control processes?
More chances of an error slipping through and the more chance of cancer.
The longer it goes on, the higher the risk.
So exactly what does this mean for us?
More tickets in the upside lottery that is cancer.
Know the facts – own your risk – decide for yourself.
• Prof Mark Corrigan’s next article will appear next fortnight.
