Cancer Ecology Commentary

  An earlier post from February described experimental evidence of the complexity in our understanding of causative factors behind carcinogenesis. Although driven in many instances by alterations in the genetic code, mutational events alone proved insufficient to account for cancer development or lack thereof in some experiments. Research pointed instead to the importance of timing of mutational events and the context in which they were occurring. Implicated in these experiments and of considerable interest for cancer ecology was the contributing effect of environmental factors on likelihood of cancer development. If this is true, that is that environmental factors, including both intrinsic as well as extrinsic influences contribute to oncogenesis, as seems likely from much cumulative experience from environmental studies, then it raises the question of just how is that those environmental signals, which themselves may not be mutagenic, would none-the-less come to influence chanc...