Cancer Ecology Commentary

In the 13 December 2023 issue of Atlantic magazine, medical oncologist and Pulitzer Prize winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee employs a metaphor from physics and cosmology, the existence of poorly understood dark matter and energy to relate a puzzle in contemporary oncology – just what causes a cancer to form in the first place, a process termed carcinogenesis. Analogous to the problem cosmologists face in a shortfall in their understanding the forces governing galaxies and an expanding universe, so too do oncologists now realize how our belief that carcinogenesis was the sole product of successive gene mutations has proven inadequate to account for many of the actual circumstances preceding some cancers encountered in the clinic and studied in the lab. Dr. Mukherjee begins his story in California in the 1970s, which at the time was a hotbed of medical research into the molecular basis of cancer. Pivotal then was the discovery at the University of California at San Francisco of how a...

Welcome to Cancer Ecology Commentary , a blog devoted to examining and sharing current research in cancer ecology and cancer evolution . Cancer ecology is the study of malignant neoplasms in conjunction with that malignancy’s accompanying environment and the interactions occurring between them. Cancer evolution is the tendency for cancers to evolve over time in the course of a malignant disease.   One benefit of viewing cancer from an ecological perspective is the use of the language and ideas from biological ecology as tools to understand and categorize those environmental forces present that influence neoplastic development and evolution. Cancers are dynamic, that is their constituent malignant cell population is subject to change over time. Because cancers are clonal , that is they originate from the neoplastic transformation of a single cell, the process of change which we observe in a cancer over time is often referred to as clonal evolution. An important hypothesis for c...