Undergraduate years: from evolution to cancer biology

I finished my BSc in Biology at Concordia in 2015. Looking back, the order in which I met the big ideas of biology shaped how I still think.

Most students experience biology as a sequence of required courses. I did too, at first. But the subjects that held my attention were the ones that explained other subjects, and I followed them more or less in the order that let each one build on the last.

Evolution first

I started in evolution. It is the one idea that makes the rest of biology make sense: why genes look the way they do, why some mechanisms are shared from yeast to humans, and why some fail with age. Everything I have worked on since leans on that foundation.

That last point is less obvious than it sounds. Natural selection acts most strongly on traits that matter before and during reproduction. Problems that appear late in life are much less visible to selection, so they are allowed to accumulate. This is one of the central explanations for why we age at all, and it was my first hint that aging was a question biology could actually answer.

Then cancer

Cancer came next, still as an undergraduate. It is evolution happening inside one body: cells that mutate, compete, and escape the rules that keep tissues in order. That framing made cancer feel less like a list of diseases and more like a process you can reason about.

Evolution taught me to ask why. Cancer taught me to ask how things go wrong.

It also explains why cancer is so hard to treat. A tumour is not a uniform mass. It is a population of cells under selection, and any treatment that kills most of them but not all can leave behind the ones best equipped to survive it. Thinking in evolutionary terms makes resistance less of a surprise and more of a prediction.

Aging came later

Aging became my focus in graduate school. In a way it connected the two: aging is what happens when the processes evolution tuned for youth slowly drift, and cancer is one of its most common consequences.

Age is the single largest risk factor for most cancers. That is not a coincidence. The same mechanisms that keep cells in check, from DNA repair to the signals that tell a damaged cell to stop dividing, become less reliable over time. Studying aging gave me a way to look at cancer from upstream.

My perspective

I tell students not to rush into a specialty. The fields you visit early become the lenses you use later. Evolution taught me to ask why, cancer taught me to ask how things go wrong, and aging taught me that the two are the same question on different timescales.

There is real pressure to specialize early, and I understand it. But the researchers I admire most can step outside their own field and recognize a familiar pattern in an unfamiliar system. That ability comes from breadth, and breadth is easiest to build before your career narrows. A course you take out of curiosity as an undergraduate can end up shaping the questions you ask for the next ten years.