Each year, billions of people get infected with viruses–with common ones like influenza and cold viruses, and rarer ones like polio and Ebola. The viruses don’t stay all that long inside of us. In most cases, our immune systems wipe them out, except for a few refugees that manage to escape to a new host and keep their species alive. In some cases, the viruses kill their unfortunate hosts, and end their own existence as well. But in some exquisitely rare cases, viruses meld with the genome of their hosts and become part of the genetic legacy their hosts pass down to future generations.

Continue reading “Our Inner Viruses: Forty Million Years In the Making” →

Biologists who study cancer have been borrowing a lot of concepts from evolution in recent years. That’s because the changes that occur inside a tumor bear some striking resemblances to what natural selection does to a population of animals, plants, or bacteria. Evolutionary biologists who study societies–from human tribes to ant colonies–have investigated how cooperation can evolve when cheating can let some individuals get ahead. Now scientists are finding evidence of cooperation and cheating among cancer cells. In my column this week for the New York Timesmy column this week for the New York Times, I look at the social life of cancer–and how we might undermine it to fight the disease.

This video, made by the authors of a new study I write about in the column, presents the gist of this idea–of killing a tumor by creating a new tumor inside of it.

Continue reading “The Tumor Within A Tumor” →