The treatise on the history of cancer, The Emperor of all Maladies, recounts the work of Burt Vogelstein in the late 1980s, who described the genetic changes required to initiate cancer. Vogelstein had found a strikingly consistent pattern between transitions in the clinical stages of cancer and certain genetic features of the disease. It was a major discovery — but one that, today, seems almost rudimentary and second nature.

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