Comments on 'a long and winding road' of ecol/evol application to cancer

Must recommend you one latest review on evolutionary cancer research.

F. Thomas et al. (2012) Applying ecological and evolutionary theory to cancer: a long and winding road. Evolutionary Applications. (Early view)

I just finished reading it in a hurry and I am giving my comments briefly.

1. I agree most of the points made in the paper, yet I think they should be reduced into two points (see the first paragraph on page 2 of their original article):
  1) How we understand the 'competition between cancerous and healthy cells' and how we can help by 'boosting the fitness of benign cells' over malignant ones.
  2) How our therapies are working and will work in fulfilling the above aims.

2. Currently I don't see the possibility to totally explain the origin of tumor using eco/evo theories. They are deeper beyond our current capability.

3. There is no hurry to include too much new concepts in this field, like epigenetics and the cancer stem cells. They need to be polished and refined before being made use of.

4. We have to better understand cells themselves, i.e. intra-cell dynamics and inter-cell competition, before talking about how they interact with their environments.

5. It may not be of too much help to look into the selection process at and above the organism level. The best outcome of that is we may get to know how we can evolve better to avoid cancer, but that's not to be achieved in a few generations. The more realistic way is to restrict this evolution-elimination process below the organism level. Imagine if a tissue or a bunch of cells inside our body, instead of this individual human, will die when it has cancer... What a beautiful happy ending that would be!