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0:00
Good day. I am Robert Weinberg.
I'm a member of the
Whitehead Institute for
biomedical research
and a professor
at the MIT Department
of Biology.
Both of these are in
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
My talk today is titled the
discovery of oncogenes,
but it really should be
titled a demonstration of
the genetic basis of cell
transformation as you will see.
0:28
If we look at the next slide,
we see here depictions
of the retina.
The left image shows
the complexity of the cell
layers in the retina.
Whereas the right slide
shows the histological
patterns of
a retinoblastoma
that derives from
one highly specified and
specific cell type
in the retina.
The fact is the tumors
always originate from one or
another specific cell of origin
and as they progress to a
high stage of malignancy,
they begin to lose many of
the characteristics that are
associated with that
specific cell type.
That is to say the
cell type of origin.
1:12
You will see that
the histological
microscopic pattern
of a tumor when compared
with the normal retina on
the left really gives
no indication of the
tissue of origin which
must be deduced from
various other kinds of markers that
are associated with the tumor.
1:33
If we go back to the history of
discovery of modern
cancer research, for me
much of the credit goes to
the Professor
Katsusaburo Yamagiwa in
the years 1910-1915
because he began to
experiment with the
question of whether one
could actually induce cancer
in a laboratory animal.
Until that time to the
extent one studied cancer.
One used animals or people who
happened to have developed
cancer, but one
was never able to
induce cancer
experimentally at will.
