Quotes About Oncogenes

Hundreds of oncogenes that promote prostate cancer, breast cancer, colon cancer, and other conditions were switched off in only three months. We published this research with Dr. J. Craig Venter (the first person to sequence a human genome) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The research community became fixated on an 'accelerator' model of cancer – one in which the normal mechanism of cell division is being actively reprogrammed by these 'rogue' genes, the oncogenes, to go into overdrive, thus causing the cells to proliferate wildly. This was the mindset at the time p53 was discovered in 1979.