Video: Could cancer be our oldest ancestor?

March 31st, 2011 in Biology / Cell & Microbiology

(PhysOrg.com) -- Arizona State University researcher Paul Davies shares his theory about cancer being our evolutionary ancestor.
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Before the Cambrian flowering of multicellular life, there was a period of about a billion years where cells began to get together and form rudimentary colonies, says Davies, an astrobiologist who is one of two scientists proposing a theory that suggests cancer cells are living fossils.

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"These rudimentary colonies, I think, were like the earliest tumors. So when people get cancer now, these tumors represent a throwback to that time about a billion years ago – that first experimentation with multicellularity," Davies says.

Provided by Arizona State University

"Video: Could cancer be our oldest ancestor?." March 31st, 2011. http://phys.org/news/2011-03-video-cancer-oldest-ancestor.html