A Viral Aetiology for Breast Cancer: Time to Re-Examine the Postulate
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite decades of research, no aetiologic factor(s) for human breast cancer has been identified and the search for a causal agent has all but been abandoned during the past thirty years. Over 60 years ago, it was demonstrated that breast tumours in mice are caused by an oncornavirus, murine mammary tumour virus (MMTV). Whilst many at that time postulated a similar virus might be the causative agent of human breast cancer, genetic evidence was difficult to obtain primarily because of the occurrence of endogenous human retrovirus (HER) sequences within the human genome that share extensive regions of nucleotide homology with MMTV. Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in the possibility that a significant proportion of human breast cancers may be caused by viral infections. Two candidate viruses have been proposed, a human retroviral analogue of MMTV (which differs significantly in sequence and characteristics from HERs) and, the Epstein-Barr virus (gamma-herpes virus). These two viruses have been reported to occur in up to 37 and 50% of breast cancer cases, respectively. Here we present the background to the infectious hypothesis for the aetiology of breast cancer and review recent findings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".