ABOVE: João Pedro de Magalhães
ALAN BANNISTER
The pink ribbons of the month of October are a visual reminder of how much primacy US society places on cancer research. Indeed, the National Cancer Institute’s 2021 budget is $6.56 billion budget out of the $42.9 billion allocated to the entirety of the National Institutes of Health—and cancer’s hefty research funding carries over into scientific publications. A literature analysis of the journal database PubMed published Wednesday (October 27) in Trends in Genetics reveals that the vast majority of human genes have been linked to cancer in some way. The database contains papers on 17,371 different human genes, according to the study, 87.7 percent of which mention cancer. Meanwhile, cancer studies are exceedingly common throughout the database, and there are several times more papers that focus on cancer than on other severe medical conditions such as strokes.
The Scientist spoke with João Pedro de ...
