We put this question to Professor Sian Harding:

Sian -   It’s very rare to get cancer of the heart.  And if you do get it, it’s usually cancer of the blood vessels in the heart angiosarcoma rather than the muscle cells of the heart itself.  And in a sense, cancer and heart disease are two ends of the spectrum with cancer being very fast-growing cells whereas; heart disease is because the heart can’t regenerate itself very much.  And one of the things that we have to be really careful about in stem cell research for heart disease is not doing things to trigger cancers.  If there were things that we might want to do for the heart like growing more blood vessels or stimulating stem cells, or reducing the amount of natural cell death are all the opposite things to what the cancer people want to do to kill off the cancers.  So we have to be really careful in treading that line.

Ben -   And Kat, is heart cancer something you come across often in your day job (at Cancer Research UK)?

Kat -   Yeah.  There’s a bit of a myth that the heart is something that doesn’t get cancer but it can happen, and as Sian says incredibly rare and it is because the heart doesn’t regenerate.  It doesn’t turnover its cells whereas tissues like breast, bowel, skin, they tend to make new cells a lot so you just increase your chances of getting cancer in those tissues.  But it can happen though it is phenomenally rare.

Kat -   I think it should be possible.  There’s certainly some evidence that I think anti-depressant drugs can change the turnover of cells.  It would be interesting to see if Sian’s got any views on this.

Sian -   Yeah.  That’s certainly true that depression reduces the turnover of cells in the brain.  So certainly from that point of view, the regeneration might have a possibility and things like repairing the pathways that are changed in epilepsy, you could see that would be very amenable to this kind of stem cell regeneration.

Ben - I think it’s partly cultural but ultimately, the actual frequency of light that our eyes are picking up is going to be same for green as it is for everybody else.  But then if we’re brought up being told that green is in fact blue then, we’ll always going to think that green is blue.  Kat, what do you think?

Kat -   Yeah.  I think we had someone on a while ago who was talking about the science of vision and basically the red I see is not the same as the red you see.  It’s because the frequency maybe the same but it really depends how the brain interprets it.

Kat -   I think you would still see the motion of the ball and you’d still see the ball.  You just might not see the colour of it.

Ben -   It has a very different texture to grass, of course.

Kat -   Yeah.

Ben -   And on the forum, there was quite a bit of a chat about this Lyner, RD and Bored Chemist all making very good points about it and Bored Chemist pointed out of course that blind people also play cricket.  So whether or not you can actually see the ball may not necessarily be a hindrance when playing cricket.  But if you are colour blind and if you’d like to let us know how you cope with playing cricket then please do get in touch.  You can drop us an email to chris@thenakedscientists.com.