β Scribed by Steve S. Sommer
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Cancer is generally viewed as a pathological process that represents a breakdown in normal physiology due to mutations in a constellation of oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes. Herein I suggest that recent work on the pattern of germline mutation in humans [reviewed in ] leads to a different viewpoint: cancer has a biological role in that it mediates evolutionary selection for a constant rate of germline mutation. This hypothesis is based on data suggesting that most germline mutations are due to endogenous processes rather than environmental mutagens. The hypothesis accounts for certain unexplained observations and leads to certain testable predictions.
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