| In April 2003 British science journalist Geoff Watts wrote in the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) an article entitled Life's lethal quality control in which he recounted James Graham's long struggle -- he started in 1978 -- to develop his idea, to see it published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Theoretical Biology in 1983 and 1984 (read those texts here), to see his book Cancer Selection: the new theory of evolution reviewed in Nature in 1992 and to receive further recognition in Nature Reviews, Cancer in 2003. (THES requires registration but Watts's article is also available at Butterflies and Wheels.)
Mentioned by Watts are the following published comments on Graham’s idea:
"Science and the underdog" a review by John W. Galloway of Graham's book Cancer Selection: the new theory of evolution in Nature vol 356, p 206, 19 March 1992. (Limited access link.)
"Cancer selection" by Armand M. Leroi, Vassiliki Koufopanou and Austin Burt in Nature Reviews, Cancer vol 3, p 226-231, March 2003. A PDF copy of their paper is available.
Graham's book has been prominently cited by Crespi and Summers in Biological Reviews and Trends in Ecology and Evolution and by Saul and Schwartz in Lethaia. Although Graham's idea "Cancer Selection" is prominently featured in both the title and the body of O'Connell and McInerney's 2005 paper in Gene, those authors do not acknowledge the source either of the idea of the term; Graham is not cited.Other citations of Graham's book or of his JTB Letters appear in Fernandez and Morris in PNAS, Gurbunova (and co-authors) in Mechanisms of Ageing and Development, Age, and Aging Cell and Greaves in Nature Reviews, Cancer.
NEW! In her paper appearing in Journal of Molecular Evolution Mary J. O'Connell summarizes Graham's view of cancer:
Cancer is not confined to the elderly in a population, it also effects organisms of reproductive age. The presence of neoplasias right across the animal kingdom from molluscs and arthropods to reptiles and mammals, places this as a very ancient disease. Therefore, animals must have developed ways to fight/prevent cancer—at least until after reproductive age. For longer-lived, larger animals and those evolving new morphologies, selection to delay or prevent deaths due to cancer would have been particularly significant. Therefore, it seems reasonable to assume that a selective advantage would exist for those in the population h anticancer adaptations, e.g., reduction of somatic mutation rate (Graham 1992).
A pdf of her complete paper is available here.
NEW! On November 23, 2011 James Graham delivered an informal talk to a group of researchers at University of California, San Francisco's Center for Evolution and Cancer. A recording of his remarks is available at this link
NEW! Citations of James Graham's book and his JTB Letters, as compiled by Google Scholar, can be found here
NEW! An ebook version of Cancer Selection is now available via Google Books for a nominal charge of $1.00. (Check the Google Books link for comparable prices in other currencies).
NEW! James Graham now has a blog devoted to Cancer Selection.
NEW! Free download of the complete text of Cancer Selection's Chapter Two, Chapter Three and Chapter Nine.
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