The Solution To Cancer?

Science
The year they crack cancer?
The mechanisms of cancer are still mysterious. That will soon change
Nov 17th 2011 | from The World In 2012 print edition

With luck 2012 will be the yearcancer is cracked. Not cured. Not by a long chalk. But understood systematically in ways that will bring cures much closer.
The reason is that cheap, rapid gene-sequencing technology means cancergenomes can now be processed on an industrial scale. The International Cancer Genome Consortium, a group of gene-sequencing laboratories scattered around the world from Cambridge, England, via Cambridge,Massachusetts, to Shenzhen, China, therefore plans to look at several hundred samples from each of 50 types of tumour, to compare them with each other and with healthy tissue from the patients' otherorgans. That will allow oncologists to sort the needles of causation from the haystacks of confusion in the messed-up DNA that most tumours have.
The problem is that identifying the relevant mutationsis hard
Cancer, from an evolutionary point of view, is a cell reverting to type. Most living organisms are individual cells. Such cells can behave completely selfishly because each of themcontributes directly to the next generation. Multicellular organisms, though, are different. Most cells in a multicellular body (a human being, for example) have a supporting role in reproduction, not a directone. They assist the gonads in making sex cells and in finding and mating with members of the opposite sex. That is not a problem in Darwinian terms, since the DNA in non-sex cells is identical tothat in sex cells (except that in any given sex cell there is only half as much of it). Non-sex cells thus propagate their genes collaterally. For a body to work, the non-sex cells must subscribe to aself-denying ordinance that curbs their own reproduction. That ordinance is enforced by genetic mechanisms which control the cycle of cell growth and division. These genes have been installed by...