Science Talk

To celebrate Darwin Day, The Institute of Cancer Research invited world-leading expert on the biology of ageing, Professor Dame Linda Partridge, to talk about how ageing stems from evolutionary processes, and what it means for diseases like cancer.

Evolution takes millions of years, except when it doesn’t. Science Communications Officer Graham Shaw considers the story of Darwin’s finches on the Galápagos Islands – a fascinating example of evolution in action, and the forces that also help cancer evade treatment.

To celebrate Darwin Day, we invited Professor Andrew Read from Pennsylvania State University to talk to us about why cancer researchers should care about the founder of evolutionary biology, and why his 150-year old findings might just be the most important weapon we have to defeat cancer.