Boveri found himself circling back to Galen—to the age-old notion that all cancers were connected by a common abnormality—the “unitary cause of carcinoma,”865 as Boveri called it. Cancer was not “an unnatural group of different maladies,”866 Boveri wrote. Instead, a common feature lurked behind all cancers, a uniform abnormality that emanated from abnormal chromosomes—and was therefore internal to the cancer cell. Boveri could not put his finger on the nature of this deeper internal abnormality. But the “unitary cause” of carcinoma lay in this disarray—not a chaos of black bile, but a chaos of
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