News > Gene editing helped crack a 100-year-old mystery about cancer

Gene editing helped crack a 100-year-old mystery about cancer

Researchers using modern gene-editing tools have discovered that the intuition of scientists from more than a century ago was right: Cells with unusual numbers of chromosomes are drivers of cancer. Scientists first noticed the phenomenon when examining cancer cells under a microscope in the early 1900s. They observed that, as cancer cells multiplied, some ended up with too many chromosomes, structures that we now know carry genes. Others wound up with too few.