- What later applications did radium's isolation make possible?
Cancer Biology
The cellular and molecular basis of cancer.
- How long did it take for Rous's discovery to be recognized with a Nobel Prize, and why the delay?
- Why did Fibiger conclude that a parasitic worm found in rat stomach tumours was the cause of cancer?
- What is the Warburg effect, and why do cancer cells ferment sugar even when oxygen is available?
- What earlier discovery by Peyton Rous took fifty years to be fully vindicated by later research?
- How did this work on viral cancer in chickens directly enable the discovery of oncogenes in the 1970s?
- Why was the idea of starving a cancer of hormones, rather than cutting or irradiating it, considered novel in 1941?
- How can a growth-factor signal that never stops being sent lead to cancer?
- What metabolic differences between cancer cells and normal cells did Elion and Hitchings exploit to design their drugs?
- What did Peyton Rous's 1911 chicken tumour experiments suggest about the origin of cancer-causing genes?
- How did Bishop and Varmus trace the src oncogene back to normal vertebrate cells rather than viral origin?
- What is a proto-oncogene's normal job in a healthy cell, and what makes it become dangerous?
- What diseases result when the phosphorylation toggle malfunctions?
- Why is the loss of cell-cycle control considered essentially what cancer is?
- Which diseases are linked to disruption of the ubiquitin-proteasome pathway?
- Why is cancer often described as a disease of failed checkpoints?
- How does the failure of programmed cell death contribute to cancer?
- How is telomerase implicated in both aging and cancer?
- Why does a cell that loses its telomeres stop dividing, while one with runaway telomerase can become cancerous?
- What is angiogenesis and why do tumours depend on it?
- Why do mutations in these repair pathways raise cancer risk?
- Why does a broken DNA damage response pathway lead to cancer?
- How did William Kaelin's research on a rare hereditary cancer syndrome connect to the oxygen-sensing pathway?
- Why does understanding the oxygen-sensing pathway matter for treating anaemia and tumours?
- How do tumours hijack the body's oxygen-sensing machinery to grow their own blood supply?
- What kinds of biological research became possible once chemists could label molecules on living cells without killing them?
- What clinical treatments now rely on drugs that block integrin activity?
- How widespread are microRNAs across multicellular life, and what diseases have they been implicated in?
- How might regulatory T cells explain why some cancers evade the immune response?