RNA, Cancer and Wells

No sooner do we get an article from ID Creationist Jonathan Wells denying a genetic basis in cancer then we get three articles in Nature connecting cancer to micro-RNA (something like micro-satellite repeats in DNA). From the New Scientist:

In the first, Gregory Hannon and his colleagues at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, US, report finding a cluster of microRNAs which appear to function as an oncogene, triggering blood cancers in mice.

In a second paper, Todd Golub and colleagues at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, US, reveal from cancerous and healthy samples of human tissue that each type of human cancer has its own distinctive “fingerprint” of miRNAs, a finding which could enable better diagnosis of cancers. Also, cancerous tissue usually contained less miRNA than healthy tissue, suggesting that miRNA might be vital for stopping cells turning cancerous.

Finally, Joshua Mendell and his colleagues at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, US, established that miRNAs help to regulate c-Myc, a well-known oncogene implicated in 15% of human cancers when it malfunctions.