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Milestones in cancer science

The types of cancer that cause easily visible tumours have been known and treated since ancient times. Mummies of ancient Egypt and Peru, dating from as long ago as 3000 BC, exhibit signs of the disease in their skeletons. About 400 BC the Greek physician Hippocrates used the term carcinoma—from the Greek karcinos, meaning “crab”—to refer to the shell-like surface, leglike filaments, and sharp pain often associated with tumours.

Speculations about the factors involved in cancer development have been made for centuries. About AD 200 the Greco-Roman physician Galen of Pergamum attributed the development of cancer to inflammation. A report in 1745 of familial cancer suggested that hereditary factors are involved in the causation of cancer. The English physician John Hill, in a 1761 paper noting a relationship between tobacco snuff and nasal cancer, was the first to point out that substances found in the environment are related to cancer development. Another English physician, Sir Percivall Pott, offered the first description of occupational risk in 1775 when he attributed high incidences of scrotal cancer among chimney sweeps to their contact with coal soot. Pott hypothesized that tumours in the skin of the scrotum were caused by prolonged contact with ropes that were saturated with chemicals found in soot. He noted that some men with scrotal cancer had not worked as chimney sweeps since boyhood—an observation suggesting that cancer develops slowly and may not give rise to clinical manifestations until long after exposure to a causal agent.

In the 1850s the German pathologist Rudolf Virchow formulated the cell theory of tumours, which stated that all cells in a tumour issue from a precursor cancerous cell. This theory laid the foundation for the modern approach to cancer research, which regards cancer as a disease of the cell.

By the end of the 19th century, it was clear that progress in understanding cancer would require intensive research efforts. To address this need a number of institutions were set up, including the Cancer Research Fund in Britain in 1902 (renamed the Imperial Cancer Research Fund two years later). To promote cancer education in the United States, the American Society for the Control of Cancer was founded in 1913; in 1945 it was renamed the American Cancer Society.

In the early years of the 20th century, researchers focused their attention on the transmission of tumours by cell-free extracts. This research suggested that an infectious agent found in the extracts was the cause of cancer. In 1908 two Danish pathologists, Vilhelm Ellermann and Oluf Bang, reported that leukemia could be transmitted in chickens by means of a cell-free filtrate obtained from a chicken with the disease. In 1911 the American pathologist Peyton Rous demonstrated that a sarcoma (another type of cancer) could be transmitted in chickens through a cell-free extract. Rous discovered that the sarcoma was caused by a virus—now called the Rous sarcoma virus—and for this work he was awarded the 1966 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

In 1915 Japanese researchers Yamagiwa Katsusaburo and Ichikawa Koichi induced the development of malignant tumours in rabbits by painting the rabbits' ears with coal tar and thus showed that certain chemicals could cause cancer. Subsequent studies showed that exposure to certain forms of energy, such as X rays, could induce mutations in target cells that led to their malignant transformation.

Viral research in the 1960s and '70s contributed to current understanding of the molecular mechanisms involved in cancer development. Much progress was made as a result of the development of laboratory techniques such as tissue culture, which facilitated the study of cancer cells and viruses. In 1968 researchers demonstrated that when a transforming virus (a virus capable of causing cancer) infects a normal cell, it inserts one of its genes into the host cell's genome. In 1970 one such gene from the Rous sarcoma virus, called src, was identified as the agent responsible for transforming a healthy cell into a cancer cell. Later dubbed an oncogene, src was the first “cancer gene” to be identified. (See the section Causes of cancer: Retroviruses and the discovery of oncogenes.) Not long after this discovery, American cell biologists Harold Varmus and J. Michael Bishop found that viral oncogenes come from normal genes (proto-oncogenes) that are present in all mammalian cells and that normally play a critical role in cellular growth and development.

The concept that cancer is a specific disturbance of the genes—an idea first proposed by Theodor Boveri in 1914—was strengthened as cancer research burgeoned in the 1970s and '80s. Researchers found that certain chromosomal abnormalities were consistently associated with specific types of cancer, and they also discovered a new class of genes—tumour suppressor genes—that contributed to cancer development when damaged.

Since that time scientists have discovered many more defective growth-regulating genes that are involved in the malignant transformation of the cell. From this work it has become clear that cancer develops through the progressive accumulation of damage in different classes of genes—oncogenes, tumour suppressor genes, and mismatch repair genes—and it is through the study of these genes that the current understanding of cancer has emerged.


José Costa
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