Chris Marshall, a pioneering cancer researcher, who has died aged 66 from the disease he spent his life studying, made important discoveries which shaped our understanding of how cancers arise and which have helped in the development of advanced therapies to treat them.
Among his most significant achievements was the identification of a human oncogene – a normal gene present in each cell that mutates and triggers cancer. This work began in 1980, when Chris established his own research team at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) in London. At that time the ICR had a distinguished record in understanding carcinogens and developing chemotherapeutic drugs, but lacked research into the rapidly developing areas of cell and molecular biology. Chris, with a colleague, Alan Hall, filled this gap. He was building on an astonishing discovery, made a few years earlier by scientists in the US, that the DNA taken out of a human cancer cell could be transferred to a mouse cell and that the mouse cell could then be turned into a cancer cell.
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