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This article examines the ancient history of cancer. The striking absence of malignancies in ancient physical remains might indicate the rarity of cancer in antiquity, which poses questions about the role of carcinogenic environmental factors in modern societies.
The integration of existing national and institutional biobanks is required to form larger resources that can be used to study the complexity and heterogeneity of cancer. This article discusses the main practical and ethical issues associated with the integration of biobanks for cancer research.
That a substantial proportion of cell lines is mislabelled or replaced by cells derived from a different individual, tissue or species has been a long known, but largely ignored problem. The history of cell line misidentification and recent efforts to develop a standard for the authentication of human cell lines using short tandem repeat profiling is discussed in this article.
