Number of words: 146

Of the twenty thousand genes in a cancer cell, Weinberg reasoned the vast majority were likely normal and only a small minority were mutated proto-oncogenes. Now imagine, for a moment, being able to take all twenty thousand genes in the cancer cell, the good, the bad, the ugly, and transferring them into twenty thousand normal cells, such that each cell receives one of the genes. The normal, unmutated genes will have little effect on the cells. But an occasional cell will receive an oncogene, and, goaded by that signal, it will begin to grow and reproduce insatiably. Reproduced ten times, these cells will form a little clump on a petri dish; at twelve cell divisions, that clump will form a visible “focus”—cancer distilled into its primordial, elemental form.

Excerpted from page 372 of ‘The Emperor of All Maladies: A biography of Cancer’ by Siddharth Mukherjee