Hah! Wow that's a blast. I used to work at a lab as an undergrad that worked on extremely similar topics, though the cancer link was more implied: http://resea

Hah! Wow that's a blast. I used to work at a lab as an undergrad that worked on extremely similar topics, though the cancer link was more implied: http://research.fhcrc.org/shou/en.html http://research.fhcrc.org/shou/en.html We had four yeast systems: Two cooperative yeast systems (exchanged metabolites the other needed to survive), and two cheater systems (needed those same metabolites to survive, but just took from the system and never gave back). One experiment I assisted with was basically putting them all together at differing ratios and seeing what happened over time - the different systems released different fluorescent proteins, so we could measure their relative populations. Common sense might dictate that the cheaters would rapidly outgrow the cooperators and eventually crash the whole system, but that actually didn't happen until very high ratios of cheaters. The cooperative yeast systems somehow managed to extinguish the cheaters pretty consistently (all the experiments were repeated and done in triplicate). This happened even at fairly absurd ratios like 3:1 cheaters:cooperators. Unfortunately, I left before any of the follow-up work to determine why that was happening. All that to say, it's fascinating how much cooperative systems really are favored in nature. Glad to see someone explicitly applying this idea to cancer.