Deep existential price

The oatmeal porridge you may have for breakfast is transformed into its body - which is quite easy to imagine. But in order for the food to be converted into energy that a small cell can absorb, an intricate chemical machinery is required. And oxygen is a vital ingredient in that process.

This year's Nobel Laureate in Medicine has made great discoveries in how the body regulates how much oxygen the body needs. If you live high up in the mountains where the air is more oxygen-poor, the number of blood cells that can capture oxygen increases, which a trait athletes sometimes exploit by training at high altitudes before a championship. High oxygen uptake improves physical ability.

Unfortunately, cancer tumors are also adept at boosting their ability to utilize oxygen by utilizing the oxygen-regulated machinery that this year's Nobel laureates in medicine have discovered.

Cancer cells that proliferate at high speed must have access to nutrition and oxygen in order to continue to grow. The tumor has the ability to accelerate blood vessel formation to provide the new cancer cells with a steady stream of oxygenated blood. Intensive research is now under way to find ways to prevent the tumor from building new blood vessels.

For over half a billion years, life on earth has been dependent on oxygen to be able to absorb nutrition. It was a prerequisite for life to develop, become multicellular, get up on land and until now when we humans can look into the machinery of cells and understand how it all works.

This year's Nobel Prize is thus deeply existential and explains the entire origin of our existence, but also directly applicable to, for example, stopping the growth of aggressive cancer tumors.