Rudolph Virchow and the Genetic Basis of Somatic Ecology

“CANCER is a genetic disease, arising from an accumulation of mutations that promote clonal selection of cells with increasingly aggressive behavior.” This single terse statement from Fearon (1997, p. 1043) is a paradigm that states the fundamentals of our present understanding of the origin and nature of cancer. The work leading to this understanding of the many pathological conditions called cancer that afflict humans, and many other animals, has occupied the full energies and efforts of uncountable numbers of biologists, biochemists, and physicians going back at least 140 years, starting with the observations of Rudolph Virchow (1821-1902). Virchow was a polymath of the same rank as his senior contemporary, Goethe: a physician, pathologist, cell biologist, ethnologist, archaeologist, anthropologist, teacher, and statesman. In 1858 Virchow gave a series of 20 lectures to a group of physicians at the Institute of Pathology in Berlin. These were published in the same year under the title Die Cellularpathologie in ihrer Begrundung auf physiologische und pathologische Gewebelehre (Virchow 1858). In these lectures he summarized many of the ideas arising from his 12 years of previous experience as a practicing pathologist studying the microscopic anatomy of tissues with special attention to those deviating from the healthy condition. He came to the conclusion that the pathological histological conditions he observed resulted in modifications of the interrelationships of body somatic cells, leading to changes that I shall call somatic ecology. Virchow is now generally best known not for this observation, but for the aphorism he stated in Lecture II of this series: “omnis cellula e cellula” (all cells come from cells).