Sue Armstrong > Quotes

“Knowledge advances as much through negative results and thwarted hypotheses as it does by theories that prove to be correct.”
― Sue Armstrong, p53: The Gene that Cracked the Cancer Code

“The research community became fixated on an ‘accelerator’ model of cancer – one in which the normal mechanism of cell division is being actively reprogrammed by these ‘rogue’ genes, the oncogenes, to go into overdrive, thus causing the cells to proliferate wildly. This was the mindset at the time p53 was discovered in 1979.”
― Sue Armstrong, p53: The Gene that Cracked the Cancer Code

“The ‘re-embryonisation of cancer cells’ was an attractive concept because of the obvious behavioural similarities between the two cell types, embryonic and cancer, and the hunt was on in a number of labs to identify proteins that were present in both normal embryo cells and tumour cells, but not in healthy, fully developed adult cells.”
― Sue Armstrong, p53: The Gene that Cracked the Cancer Code

“From what they have learnt so far, they reckon that some 20–30 per cent of our natural lifespan is accounted for by our genetic heritage, while environmental influences account for the rest.”
― Sue Armstrong, Borrowed Time: The Science of How and Why We Age

“Leonard Hayflick, in the 1960s, demonstrated that normal human cells have a finite limit to proliferation: the population only doubles in number about 50 times.”
― Sue Armstrong, Borrowed Time: The Science of How and Why We Age

“trawl through the history of cancer research draws one up sharp: almost everything we know today about cancer – as a disease of the cells and of the genes – was suggested by someone way back before scientists had any way of testing their ideas, and who is often forgotten by those who later reveal them as facts when the world is more ready to listen.”
― Sue Armstrong, p53: The Gene that Cracked the Cancer Code

“This means that from a molecular viewpoint there is one basic condition to get a cancer: p53 must be switched off. If p53 is on, and hence functioning properly, cancer will not develop.”
― Sue Armstrong, p53: The Gene that Cracked the Cancer Code

“p53 – bestowed on it simply because it makes a protein with a molecular weight of 53 kilodaltons.”
― Sue Armstrong, p53: The Gene that Cracked the Cancer Code

“What specially excited him when his graduate student Daniel Linzer, who did the original experiments, showed him his results was that the rogue protein occurred in large quantities in the SV40-infected cells, suggesting it must be doing something important, and that it was interacting specifically with the viral oncogene, large T antigen. What’s more, his team had found exactly the same protein also in uninfected fetal cells.”
― Sue Armstrong, p53: The Gene that Cracked the Cancer Code