Abstract
GENES ARE NOT THE MASTERS but the servants of the cell. That was the heretical word from Emmanuel Farber, MD, one of a handful of speakers at the recent 80th annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) in San Francisco, Calif. It emanated from a symposium entitled of Cancer, sandwiched among scores of presentations on the molecular genetics of cancer. For a better part of the decade, the prevailing wisdom of the AACR, whose membership is heavily weighted with basic investigators, has been that cancer is a genetic disease, which can be traced to a succession of DNA mutations and the influences of the resultant gene products. The epigeneticists are challenging this notion, declaring that genetic alterations alone are not sufficient to cause cancer; they need to occur in hostile extracellular environments. Their declarations have fallen on deaf ears. Epigenetics is the stepchild of cancer
Published Version
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call