What if one of the central assumptions about cancer is wrong?
For more than half a century, cancer research has largely focused on the idea that cancer begins with mutations in genes that disrupt the normal controls on cell growth.
But what if the fundamental problem isn't primarily genetic mutation?
What if cancer is instead rooted in something more basic: a breakdown in the organization and balance of chromosomes inside the cell?
That's the provocative argument at the heart of The Outsider: A Personal Odyssey into the Essence of Cancer, by biochemist Dr. David William Rasnick.
Rasnick takes readers on a journey through more than a century of cancer research, revisiting scientists whose ideas, he argues, were pushed aside as the field increasingly embraced the gene-mutation model.
At the center of that history is Theodor Boveri, whose early twentieth-century work connected abnormal chromosomes with cancer long before modern molecular biology made it possible to investigate the genome in detail.
But The Outsider is also a very personal story.
It's about what happens when a scientist challenges an established paradigm—and discovers that scientific disagreements aren't always settled simply by evidence.
Today, Dr. David Rasnick joins us to talk about cancer, chromosomes, scientific orthodoxy, the history of biomedical research, and the complicated question of what happens when an outsider believes he's seeing something the establishment has missed.
