Lecture by Professor Mikhail Gelfand “Evolution and Medicine”

Do doctors need to understand evolution? Darwinian evolution—inherited random changes and subsequent natural selection—is usually understood as a historical explanation of the interconversion of organisms. But it also explains the processes occurring inside our body. And it turns out that exactly the same Darwinian considerations describe the development of adaptive immunity (and explain the benefits of vaccinations) and the interaction of clones inside a cancer tumor (and explain the development of a drug-induced tumor during chemotherapy)