The Dark Genome: How Noncoding RNAs Cause Cancer

Cancer research has long focused on mutations in genes that code for proteins, the molecules that carry out most visible work inside cells, in an effort to explain how healthy cells become malignant. Yet this protein-centered view has left major gaps, including why cancers of the same type often share just few genetic mutations and why many so-called cancer genes also appear in healthy tissues. A new perspective now argues that the key drivers of cancer may lie not in protein-coding genes...