How cancer was created

The cells inside a tumour change and evolve just like animals in the wild. Understanding how this works could help us stop cancer in its tracks

Will we ever win the "war on cancer"?

The latest figures show just how distant a prospect victory is right now. In the US, the lifetime risk of developing cancer is 42 per cent in men and 38 per cent in women, according to the American Cancer Society.

The figures are even worse in the UK. According to Cancer Research UK, 54 per cent of men and 48 per cent of women will get cancer at some point in their lives.

And cases are on the rise. As of 2015 there are 2.5 million people in the UK living with the disease, according to Macmillan Cancer Support. This is an increase of 3 per cent each year, or 400,000 extra cases in five years.

Figures like this show that cancer is not only extremely pervasive, but also becoming more and more common.

But why will so many people develop the disease at some point in their lives?

To get to the answer, we must understand that cancer is an unfortunate by-product of the way evolution works.

Large and complicated animals like humans are vulnerable to cancer precisely because they are large and complicated.

But even though it is evolutionary processes that have made cancer such a problem, it is also evolutionary thinking that is now leading to pioneering treatments that could stack the odds against cancer and in favour of our health.

To understand how cancer exists at all, we need to go back to a fundamental process that occurs in our bodies: cell division.

We each started out when an egg and sperm cell met and fused. Within a few days, that egg and sperm had turned into a ball containing a few hundred cells.

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