Two people can smoke the same amount, live in the same place, and eat the same food, and one gets cancer while the other does not. A new experiment offers direct evidence for part of why, though it was conducted in mice and it changes nothing about anyone's medical care.
Researchers at the University of Cambridge exposed genetically different mice to the same DNA damage and found that inherited genetic background influenced not only whether tumors developed but the evolutionary path those tumors took afterward. The paper, titled "Genetic background sets the trajectory of experimental cancer evolution," was published in Nature.
