What causes cancer? This deceptively simple question has a devilishly complex answer. So when U.S. researchers proposed a relatively simple mathematical formula to explain a long-standing conundrum in cancer earlier this year, it was bound to get a lot of attention.
The study published in the journal Science suggested a correlation between the variation in cancer occurrence between different tissues and the number of stem cell divisions in each tissue. In other words, it said the tissues most vulnerable to cancer are those with the greatest number of stem cell divisions.
