218
The Body Electric
that cancer cells weren't special but merely embryonic cells in a post-
embryonic body. Rose's work led directly to Andres's theory a few years
Unfortunately, biology was still firmly gripped by anti-dedifferentia-
tionism, and these ideas were partly ridiculed, partly ignored. The reac-
tion held back cancer research for decades, because the dogma implied
that carcinogenesis, like differentiation, was irreversible—once a cancer
cell, always a cancer cell. As long as this view was sacred, the only
possible way to cure cancer was to cut it out or kill it with drugs and X
rays. We've been beating that dead horse for fifty years now with trag-
ically modest increases in survival rates. Surgery works only against tu-
mors that haven't yet spread. Chemotherapy depends on differences
between malignant and healthy cells. However, the differences aren't as
great
as
we
would
like, because cancer arises, not in some
distant
swamp, but from a slight change in our own cells. Therefore chemother-