Mel Greaves

Mel Greaves established the Darwinian evolutionary framework for understanding cancer as a process of clonal selection and adaptation, and his seminal studies of childhood leukemia revealed that pre-leukemic clones originate in utero through chromosomal translocations and undergo years of evolutionary selection before clinical presentation. His Centre for Evolution and Cancer at the Institute of Cancer Research has trained a generation of researchers in evolutionary oncology and has produced transformative insights into how evolutionary principles can be applied to cancer prevention and treatment. His conceptual contributions have fundamentally shaped the modern understanding of cancer as an evolutionary disease.