"Could it be, we wonder, that cancer’s predilection for a hypoxic environment reflects the prevailing conditions on Earth at the time when multicellularity first evolved, before the second great oxygenation event?"
Could it be that once cells are approximately 2-3 cell-diameters away from a blood vessel they die of hypoxia, and thus cannot break through a basement membrane and achieve metastasis without evolving a tolerance for hypoxia? This is essentially the cancer-specific version of the anthropic principle.
I love it when physicists start spinning yarns about other people's fields.
They are hardly "spinning yarns". Did you miss the part where they were asked to be part of a cross-disciplinary program, along with other physicists, to bring fresh ideas to the field of cancer research? They are doing what they were asked to do, and wrote an article on it. It's hardly a setup for clinical trials in which human lives are at stake, so I think we can, while holding out for evidence that increases the probabilities of certainty in this theory, allow them to do what they've been asked to do.
no, the predilection for hypoxia is due to the warburg effect (which used to be thought of as a cause for cancer but now is accepted as the result of carcinogens, but a 'hallmark' of cancer). Fermentation of glucose in the cytosol is more efficient than using the oxygen-requiring mitochondria - However, it can only occur in less aerobic conditions. So the rapid division of cancer cells is assisted by this shift in metabolism, but that requires anaerobiosis.
Could it be that once cells are approximately 2-3 cell-diameters away from a blood vessel they die of hypoxia, and thus cannot break through a basement membrane and achieve metastasis without evolving a tolerance for hypoxia? This is essentially the cancer-specific version of the anthropic principle.
I love it when physicists start spinning yarns about other people's fields.