Why is the zebrafish useful in cancer research?
Dr. White: Zebrafish have been used now for probably 20 years because people figured out that fish have genes that are amazingly similar to human genes. They turn on and off in different ways — that is why a fish does not look like a human — but the genes themselves are pretty similar. We started studying fish in cancer because cancer is fundamentally a disease of altered genes, so it sort of came together that if we can study genes in fish, that will probably tell us something about cancer. What enabled you to be able to look at this cancer? Dr. White: The thing that we had not been good at looking at was, ‘How does cancer start and how does it spread?’ I became interested and thought, Could I do this in a living animal in a way that we cannot do otherwise? A few of us had the idea that – ‘What if we could make a fish that was fairly transparent so we could see the origins of just when the tumor is starting and how it spreads within the body over time,’ which is pretty analogous to
