Paris - A team of US scientists in a "landmark" discovery has for the first time broken down the four stages in the transformation of a normal cell to a cancerous cell, the scientific magazine Nature said yesterday.
The transformation of the cells involves three genes, one that makes cells immortal, one that stimulates their growth and one that prevents them from self-destruction. The findings were the work of biologist Dr Robert Weinberg, of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, attached to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge near Boston.