Dividing HeLa cellsWIKIMEDIA, NIHComputational studies published in the last couple of years have posited different major risk factors for cancer, from random mutations in stem cells to environmental carcinogens. Testing these theories in mice, researchers at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, and the University of Cambridge in the U.K. found that mutations in stem cells do play a significant role, according to a study published yesterday (August 25) in Cell.
“An argument has raged across the scientific community for some years now—some say cancer is ‘bad luck’ because mutations arise by chance in stem cells, while others argue environmental carcinogens are more important,” study coauthor Richard Gilbertson, director of the Cancer Research UK Cancer Center at Cambridge and former director of the St. Jude Comprehensive Cancer Center, said in a statement. “This disagreement has arisen largely from the use of different mathematical models to look at existing human cancer and stem cell data, from which it is extremely difficult to tease out the impact of individual factors. Therefore, we tested these different opinions in actual experimental models that looked at the individual components that might drive cancer.”
In January 2015, a research team at Johns ...
