The Outsider

The human and political sides of this decades-long odyssey are as intriguing and essential as understanding the essence of cancer itself. Consequently, The Outsider' s Advantage is much more than The Chromosomal Imbalance Theory of Cancer the author wrote for cancer researchers. Presented are the combined results of more than a century of the on-again, off-again efforts to understand what cancer really is, how it comes about, and what to do about it. The goal is to demystify the whole process and make it accessible to all. Along the way you' ll learn about the personal and professional costs of confronting dogma: lost friendships, relentless personal attacks, and attempts at the highest levels of government to punish and silence dissent. The pharmaceutical industry' s Sisyphean pursuit of anti-cancer drugs is almost exclusively focused on genes thought to cause cancer. However, there are no culprit genes and proteins responsible for cancer! By the late 19th Century, cancer cells were known to have massively unbalanced chromosomes. Aneuploidy is the fancy word for unbalanced chromosomes. For nearly a century, there was no definite way to settle the question of whether aneuploidy caused cancer or was simply collateral damage caused by cancer. But as the 20th Century was about to expire, professor Peter Duesberg at the University of California at Berkeley and David Rasnick overcame tremendous institutional obstacles and personal attacks to prove cancer is a disease of unbalanced chromosomes. Unbalanced chromosomes are unstable. Without chromosomal instability, there is no cancer, no progression, no metastasis, no drug resistance. Progression to cancer results from the continual scrambling of unbalanced chromosomes as the cells divide. Massively unbalanced chromosomes turn normal cells into cancer cells by disrupting the organized interactions of the many tens of thousands of cellular components. From the aneuploid cell' s point of view, chrom