P53 as seen by an outsider

Has the p53-field made a major impact on cancer research? Indeed it has. From its earliest beginnings, cancer research has been looking for the fundamental change in cancer cells, the ultimate common denominator. The idea that such a change must exist, was, if not abandoned, substantially mollified by the increasing realization, from the late 1950s, that cancer development is a multistep process, based on the individual reassortment of several unit characteristics (Foulds, 1958) or, as we now say, phenotypic traits.