Physics of Cancer: The Impact of Heterogeneity

Physics is a discipline which is more than the sum of its parts: experimentalists and theorists work together to make testable, quantifiable models of both fundamental parts of nature and also exotic ways that these parts can interact with each other. That approach has been remarkably successful in the past 100 years, culminating recently in the possible detection of the Higgs boson, the fundamental particle that gives mass to other particles. We have not been nearly so lucky in the search for a ``cure`` for cancer, one of the most feared afflictions. Remarkably, the mortality rate has remained basically flat  for the past 100 years, in spite of massive outpourings of money and incredible increases our understanding of biology. Why then have we basically failed? I will argue that the reason why we have failed is the deep heterogeneity that underlies cancer, a heterogeneity that reaches across space, time, genomics and proteomics. However, I believe that  this very heterogeneity may provide a key to the control of cancer. We are at the stage of our understanding of cancer where high energy physics was in the 1960s: a bewildering array of particle resonances with little underlying qualitative or quantitive understanding: the field was heterogenous. However, theory and experiment joined together to unify the  picture in what we now call the Standard Model. I will argue that it may be possible for a Standard Model to arise out of the vast complexity of cancer as we now see it and give us insights into the possible existence of a a Higgs boson, if you will, which drives the heterogeneity of cancer.