to grow new cell lines. And in fact, “very few [new human cell lines] have been reported since.” Not only that, he said, but there had been no new examples of “so-called spontaneous transformed human cell cultures” since. Everyone in the audience knew what that meant. On top of saying they’d possibly wasted more than a decade and millions of research dollars, Gartler was also suggesting that spontaneous transformation—one of the most celebrated prospects for finding a cure for cancer—might not exist. Normal cells didn’t spontaneously become cancerous, he said; they were simply taken over by
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