In a recent issue of Annals of Oncology, Purushotham and Sullivan [1] reviewed Darwin’s legacy to cancer and medicine. However, they did not discuss Darwin’s Pangenesis, which provides a novel mechanism for cancerometastasis. Darwin habitually thought big. But the cell theory allowed him to think small. He wrote The Origin of Species without any reference to cellular structure in animals and pl...

The last 10 years have seen something of a revolution in experimental carcinogenesis, sparked by the discovery of oncogenes [1-3]. The first such gene and most of the ones that followed [1] have been isolated as part of the genome of a tumor-inducing retrovirus. Mostly obtained from birds and mice, these viral oncogenes are nearly identical to genes present in normal cells and, because of their...

In order to detect signs of oncogene activity and elucidate their possible role in avian ontogeny we implemented two different strategies. One was to detect either the protein product or messenger RNA in situ at various stages of development. The other was to try and disturb development with retroviruses carrying one or several oncogenes in their activated forms. Time- and tissue-specific expre...

In recent years cellular homologues of many viral oncogenes have been identified. As these genes are partially homologous to viral oncogenes and are activated in some tumour cell lines they are termed "proto-oncogenes". In tumour cell lines proto-oncogenes are activated by either quantitative or qualitative changes in gene structure: activation of these genes was originally thought to be a nece...

Oncogenes capable of transforming NIH/3T3 cells are often present in human tumors and tumor cell lines. Such oncogenes were not detected in normal fibroblast lines derived from patients with several clinical syndromes associated with greatly increased cancer risk. Thus, germ-line transmission of these oncogenes does not appear to be the predisposing factor responsible for these high cancer risk...

An important assumption of our current understanding of the mechanisms of carcinogenesis has been the belief that clarification of the cancer process would inevitably reveal some of the crucial mechanisms of normal human gene regulation. Since the momentous work of Bishop and Varmus, both the molecular and the biochemical processes underlying the events in the development of cancer have become ...

Specific chromosomal changes are consistently associated with several morphologically or histologically distinct forms of cancer [1]. In a few hematolymphoid malignancies, chromosomal translocations are known to occur near or within the cytologic loci for cellular homologues of retroviral-encoded oncogenes [2]. For example, both the c-abl and c-myc proto-oncogenes are targets for interchromosom...

Focal copy number gains or losses are important genomic hallmarks of cancer. The genomic distribution of oncogenes and tumor-suppressor genes (TSG) in relation to focal copy number aberrations is unclear. Our analysis revealed that the mean distance of TSGs from oncogenes was significantly shorter than that of noncancer genes, suggesting that oncogenes and TSGs tend to be in close physical prox...

Our understanding of estrogen (17b-estradiol, E2) receptor biology has evolved in recent years with the discovery and characterization of a 7-transmembrane-spanning G protein–coupled estrogen receptor (GPER/GPR30) and the development of GPER-selective functional chemical probes. GPER is highly expressed in certain breast, endometrial, and ovarian cancers, establishing the importance of noninvas...