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58 CHAPTER 3

2000; Weiss 2000). Recent technological advances should make it pos-
sible to get more genomic data on various tumor and metastatic cells,
so perhaps phylogenetic analyses will be available in the future.

3.9 Summary

This chapter presented evidence that cancer progresses through mul-
tiple stages. To connect those biological details on multistage progres-
sion to quantitative theories of cancer incidence, we need a way to mea-
sure the shifts in incidence caused by particular genetic and physiologi-
cal changes. The early history of multistage theory provided such a con-
nection between genetics and incidence; however, some of the insights
of those early studies have been lost amid the great recent progress
in genetics and biochemistry. The next chapter reviews the history of
multistage theory to set the background for later chapters, in which I
build the tools needed to develop quantitative analyses of the causes of
cancer.