In the October 24
Smoking selects mutants
In the October 24 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Rodin and Rodin propose that smoking leads to increased lung cancer not by causing more mutations, but by selecting for those mutations that do arise (Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2000, 97:12244-12249). They take advantage of an increase in p53 mutational data in nonsmokers and find, for example, that the frequency of silent mutations in p53 is identical between smokers and non-smokers. In contrast, twice as many lung cancers from smoke

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William Wells
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