That cancer is predominantly not "just" a mutagenic defect but that it more specifically recruits developmental controls and make them go go awry is relatively new in biology, but not revolutionary.
Can you quantify "relatively new"? It was clear to me 10 years ago, and I thought it was common knowledge, but then everyone I talked to (especially people from medicine and biology) called it "an novel, interesting theory" when I talked about it (and had to explain why that would make sense).
If there's a name or reference for this theory, I would appreciate a link.
[ My argument that gets the "novel and interesting" theory remark is that in many cases cancer becomes "chemo resistant" after much shorter than any multicellular organism would -- thus, it can't just be a random mutagenic defect, and must involve non trivial developmental/evolutionary machinery. I don't remember where I picked it up, and it might have had a different form, but it was over 10 years ago ]
yeah, that's probably about right. I had first started hearing about it 3 years into grad school (i.e. 6 years ago), and I wasn't really a biologist with an interest in oncology until recently.
That said, the idea of targeting characteristic differences that show up when those controls are turned off was somewhat novel to me. But I'm not in the field, and that might be old hat as well.
