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.
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 ]