What genes contribute to social interactions such as cheating or altruism? And what could cheating genes tell us about sociality, multicellularity, and cancer? A social soil amoeba could hold the answers.
Infographic: Dictyostelium Developmental Cycle
Video: Social activity of D. discoideum
Genetic control of social behavior
I was writing my thesis on the role of p53 in cancer in the early 1990s with a gas mask at my side. It was the first Gulf War, and the threat of Scud missiles that Iraq was launching at Israel made focusing on my thesis difficult. I had already decided to leave cancer research. I welcomed the distraction of reading about altruism, and about the strange little organism I had picked as a model of benevolent behavior: the social amoeba, Dictyostelium discoideum.
Those tumultuous days in Israel marked a major turning point in ...
