SV40 and Cellular Gene Expression in the Maintenance of the Tumorigenic Syndrome

The end point of the study of viral transformation is a greater understanding of the mechanism of host growth control. At present, this mechanism is totally unknown. Therefore, we are currently left with the task of tabulating the response of the cell to viral tumorigenic transformation. Such work provides a necessary context for any future hypotheses on the mechanism of cellular growth control, since such hypotheses will have to explain these responses. For-tunately, tumorigenic transformation correlates w ll with a relatively small number of phenotypic hanges in the transformed cell. In rat fibroblast lines trans-formed by SV40, these changes tend to occur coor-dinately, forming a syndrome (Fig. 1) (Risser an