Rosenfeld Simon
National Cancer Institute, Division of Cancer Prevention, Rockville, Maryland, USA.
Cancer Inform. 2013 Dec 1;12:221-9. doi: 10.4137/CIN.S13013. eCollection 2013.
Two drastically different approaches to understanding the forces driving carcinogenesis have crystallized through years of research. These are the somatic mutation theory (SMT) and the tissue organization field theory (TOFT). The essence of SMT is that cancer is derived from a single somatic cell that has successively accumulated multiple DNA mutations, and that those mutations occur on genes which control cell proliferation and cell cycle. Thus, according to SMT, neoplastic lesions are the results of DNA-level events. Conversely, according to TOFT, carcinogenesis is primarily a problem of tissue organization: carcinogenic agents destroy the normal tissue architecture thus disrupting cell-to-cell signaling and compromising genomic integrity. Hence, in TOFT the DNA mutations are the effect, and not the cause, of the tissue-level events. Cardinal importance of successful resolution of the TOFT versus SMT controversy dwells in the fact that, according to SMT, cancer is a unidirectional and mostly irreversible disease; whereas, according to TOFT, it is curable and reversible. In this paper, our goal is to outline a plausible scenario in which TOFT and SMT can be reconciled using the framework and concepts of the self-organized criticality (SOC), the principle proven to be extremely fruitful in a wide range of disciplines pertaining to natural phenomena, to biological communities, to large-scale social developments, to technological networks, and to many other subjects of research.
经过多年研究，出现了两种截然不同的方法来理解驱动癌症发生的力量。这两种方法分别是体细胞突变理论（SMT）和组织组织场理论（TOFT）。SMT的核心观点是，癌症起源于单个体细胞，该体细胞相继积累了多个DNA突变，且这些突变发生在控制细胞增殖和细胞周期的基因上。因此，根据SMT，肿瘤性病变是DNA水平事件的结果。相反，根据TOFT，癌症发生主要是一个组织组织问题：致癌因素破坏了正常的组织结构，从而扰乱了细胞间信号传导并损害了基因组完整性。因此，在TOFT中，DNA突变是组织水平事件的结果而非原因。成功解决TOFT与SMT争议的至关重要性在于，根据SMT，癌症是一种单向且大多不可逆的疾病；而根据TOFT，它是可治愈且可逆的。在本文中，我们的目标是勾勒出一个合理的情景，在这个情景中，可以使用自组织临界性（SOC）的框架和概念来调和TOFT和SMT，自组织临界性原理在与自然现象、生物群落、大规模社会发展、技术网络以及许多其他研究主题相关的广泛学科中已被证明极具成效。
