Cosy Science

What environmental factors shape the genetic make-up of our cells to make them cancerous? Is this an instant transition from healthy to cancerous or one of many steps to become malignant? Can we carry cancerous cells that we cannot detect?

Professor David Pellman is currently the Margaret M. Dyson Professor of Pediatric Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Professor of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His lab studies the mechanisms underlying normal cell division and the cell division defects in cancer cells that cause genetic instability. David completed his medical training at the University of Chicago before moving to Boston for his clinical fellowship training at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Whitehead Institute, MIT, he was appointed as an assistant professor at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in 1995.