In Lewis Carroll’s poem, when the hunters finally capture the deceptive Snark, it reveals itself not to be a foreign beast, but one of the human hunters sent to trap it. And so it had turned out with cancer. Cancer genes came from within the human genome. Indeed the Greeks had been peculiarly prescient yet again in their use of the term oncos. Cancer was intrinsically “loaded” in our genome, awaiting activation. We were destined to carry this fatal burden in our genes—our own genetic “oncos.” Varmus and Bishop were awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery of the cellular origin of
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