A CANCER, put simply, is a gang of rogue cells multiplying out
of control. But each gang is different, so “cancer” is actually
a term that embraces hundreds of specific ailments propelled by
an even larger number of genetic and epigenetic traits. The old
ways of characterising it, by the anatomical site of its debut
(kidney, for example, or prostate gland) and the histology of
its cells, seem increasingly out of date. Instead, thanks to
genomics, researchers have unprecedented information on the
molecular changes which propel it. The challenge is making sense
of those data and putting them to use.  A pair of papers just
published in Nature Genetics begin to do that. The Cancer Genome
Atlas, a project launched by America’s National Institutes of
Health, has assembled genetic data on thousands of tumours and
made them available to anyone who wants to analyse them. These
studies are early fruits of that endeavour.  One, led by Rameen
Beroukhim of the Broad Institute, in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
looked at cancer