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In the mid-1800s, Lionel Smith Beale, an English physician and microscopist at King’s College in London, peered through his microscope at a smear of saliva and mucus coughed up by a man with cancer of the larynx. Beale carefully drew what he saw: cells unconnected with each other and radically diverse in size and shape. He noted that the cells’ nuclei varied in number, size, and appearance. His observations, published in 1860, provide one of the first descriptions of how cancer can ripple and distort the typical appearance of the cell’s nucleus, a sign of the genetic havoc the disease wreaks.
More than 150 years later, scientists are still trying to understand how the physical shape of the genome changes in response to disorder and disease. To fit six and a half feet of DNA inside a single nucleus, the double helix wraps around coin-shaped histone ...
