Cancer cells are sophisticated evolutionary machines that can be understood and managed by applying evolutionary principles.

“and and because it's very appealing because of course their living systems you know the ecology of of you know swamps and that sort of thing is very complicated and yet they can more or less master these these these complex relationships and so that was appealing to me um it was also appealing to me because you know when you work in a cancer center um the the uh the cancer almost takes on a a persona a like an evil entity kind of thing almost magical in its ability to uh to overcome anything that the physicians do and and and if you talk to oncologists many of them will you know have that they may not say it but they have that kind of sense of it and to me just saying that cancers have to obey darwinian laws that they're not magic they're not unfathomable they they simply are really good evolutionary machines and we can we can we can master this we we we understand evolution and and we can get on top of this this is this you know it's not it's not something that we cannot understand because before that it just felt like we have no basis to understand this it just happens and we do this and this happens and so this to me gave it some deterministic quality some some cause effect uh relationships that uh that at least to me were comforting like yeah we could we could deal with this”