0:00
I am Felix Mitelman
at the University of
Lund, in Sweden.
And my lecture
will be on the role played
by chromosome translocations
in cancer development.
I will also briefly discuss
the clinical significance
of translocations
as diagnostic
and prognostic tools
in the management
of cancer patients.
And finally, I will present
some remaining questions
as to how, when and why
the aberrations are formed.
0:31
But first,
a historical background
as an introduction.
And an appropriate
starting point
is 100 years ago in 1914,
when Theodor Boveri
in this famous book, in English,
on the origin of cancer
presented a conceptually
new idea, which later became known
as the somatic mutation
theory of cancer.
0:57
Boveri proposed
that cancer originates
in a single cell
by mitotic disturbances
resulting
in chromosome aberrations.
Through
subsequent cell divisions,
this acquired genetic change
is propagated
to all daughter cells.
And as a consequence,
all cells in a cancer
carry the genetic abnormality
that initiated this process.
This remarkably prescient idea
still today remains
the paradigmatic view
of cancer pathogenesis
supported by
a wealth
of experimental evidence.
But it long remained
a theoretical idea,
which could not be
examined critically
until technical improvements
in human cytogenetics
were made half a century later,
and led to the description in 1956
