How malignant cells evade host coordination systems
How selection pressure drives cells to bypass multicellular control systems.
Multicellular organisms solve a fundamental coordination problem: preventing individual cells from defecting to pursue their own reproductive interests. The solution is multiple overlapping control systems—cells must request permission to divide, die when detached from proper tissue location, submit to spatial constraints from neighbors, and pass quality control checks at multiple stages.
Cancer represents the rare combinations of mutations that happen to disable multiple independent control systems simultaneously. This multi-hit requirement was first discovered mathematically before anyone could sequence cancer genomes.
In 1953-1954, epidemiologists noticed that cancer incidence
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