Cancer Research UK on The Rest Is Science

Transcript

Hannah Fry: Okay. Well, to try and answer that question, Cancer Research UK scientists are tapping into one of the world's oldest bowel cancer archives because hidden beneath this hospital, there is tens of thousands of bowel cancer samples that have been collected all the way back to the nineteen fifties. Right? And what cancer research UK scientists have been doing has been hunting for essentially genomic scars, right, little bits of DNA damage inside of the tumors. Because different causes of cancer can end up leaving different scars in the DNA, and you can now use whole genome sequencing to map all of the DNA of all of those tumors.