The Cheating Cell: How Evolution Helps Us Understand and Treat Cancer

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A fundamental and groundbreaking reassessment of how we view and manage cancer

When we think of the forces driving cancer, we don't necessarily think of evolution. But evolution and cancer are closely linked, for the historical processes that created life also created cancer. The Cheating Cell delves into this extraordinary relationship, and shows that by understanding cancer's evolutionary origins, researchers can come up with more effective, revolutionary treatments.

Athena Aktipis goes back billions of years to explore when unicellular forms became multicellular organisms. Within these bodies of cooperating cells, cheating ones arose, overusing resources and replicating out of control, giving rise to cancer. Aktipis illustrates how evolution has paved the way for cancer's ubiquity, and why it will exist as long as multicellular life does. Even so, she argues, this doesn't mean we should give up on treating cancer in fact, evolutionary approaches offer new and promising options for the disease's prevention and treatments that aim at long term management rather than simple eradication.

Looking across species from sponges and cacti to dogs and elephants we are discovering new mechanisms of tumour suppression and the many ways that multicellular life-forms have evolved to keep cancer under control. By accepting that cancer is a part of our biological past, present, and future and that we cannot win a war against evolution treatments can become smarter, more strategic, and more humane.

Unifying the latest research from biology, ecology, medicine, and social science, The Cheating Cell challenges us to rethink cancer's fundamental nature and our relationship to it.

Reviews

"Aktipis takes an evolutionary approach to cancer, tracing the ways cells cheat natural selection and showing how the human body evolved to outsmart many of those threats. She invites readers to put themselves in the role of a cancer cell and learn about the ways in which the disease and the history of human existence are intertangled."---Erin Blakemore, Washington Post
"Darwinian approach to evolution of cancer and cancer-resistance. Brilliant book, up there with Nesse & Williams."---Richard Dawkins on Twitter
"The Cheating Cell reads like a deep and personal hypothesis coming from a researcher who has spent over a decade studying the evolutionary foundations of cancer."---David C. S. Filice, Evolution
"The Cheating Cell makes for fascinating reading and forces a radical reconsideration of what cancer is and how we should deal with it."---Leon Vlieger, The Inquisitive Biologist

Author Bio

Athena Aktipis is associate professor in the Department of Psychology and at the Arizona Cancer Evolution Center at Arizona State University and cofounder of the International Society for Evolution, Ecology and Cancer. She is also the host of the science podcast Zombified and the producer of Channel Zed. Twitter @AthenaAktipis