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The Italian biologist Renato Dulbecco (1914-2012) had early success isolating a mutant of the polio virus which was used to create a life-saving vaccine. Later in his career, he initiated the Human Genome Project and was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1975 for furthering our understanding of cancer caused by viruses. [Listener: Paola De Paoli Marchetti; date recorded: 2005]
TRANSCRIPT: And you see this is a very logical thing because the tumour has all the characteristics of stem cells: a tumour develops indefinitely, it has these... in the cells, there are these telomeres at the end of chromosomes and there is thus the enzyme that can reconstruct the telomeres in normal differentiated cells this enzyme is not there, in the cancer cells it is there, in the stem cells it is in other new things. In short, there are certain characteristics that place tumour cells close to stem cells, so it is likely that the tumour arises from the stem cells of the organ, which are altered. It is the alteration that doesn't allow them to differentiate normally, but they continue to maintain their characteristics, they multiply without the cells, the necessary stimuli that the normal stem cells should have become independent and change a lot. In short, there is clearly a change in the DNA which, as we know, is still at the basis of all cancers. So this for the moment is purely an hypothesis, but the data...
[PDPM] Yes, you said it was probable, in fact, it is probable.
And yes, precisely, it's not only our results... our results suggest this because they agree with all the other observations of stem cells in various fields, you see? So, now where are we? Now we shall see how it progressed, that it wasn't easy.
