Mel Greaves

Melvyn Greaves (born 1941) is a British cancer biologist and professor at the Institute of Cancer Research, London, known for applying evolutionary and ecological theory to cancer, and in particular to childhood leukemia.

Cancer as an evolutionary process

Greaves’s central position is that cancer is a Darwinian process: somatic evolution within the body generates clonal diversity, and selection in the tumor microenvironment — including selection imposed by therapy — drives progression, relapse and resistance. His book Cancer: The Evolutionary Legacy (2000) made this framework accessible to a broad audience and argued that many features of cancer, including its age distribution and its mismatch with