Feature: Sympathy for the devil 5 January 2010. By Chrissie
Giles The small plastic tube is cloudy with condensation, but
just visible inside is a pale chunk of tissue, floating in a
colourless liquid. Holding the tube is Dr Elizabeth Murchison,
who is telling me about her travels across the world to pick up
samples for her research at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute,
near Cambridge. Unlike the other researchers working on the
Cancer Genome Project there, Elizabeth isn't concerned directly
with human disease. The samples she's holding are from dog
tumours, and there's also a freezer drawer containing tissue
from Tasmanian devils (Latin name: Sarcophilus harrisii). Also
unlike her colleagues, she's dealing with a type of cancer that
is transmissible - spread by the physical transfer of cancer
cells from one animal to another. These rare cancers have been
noted in the dog, devil and hamster, but - thankfully - not in
humans. The Tasmanian devil, a marsupial the size of a small
dog, is now found in the wild