Hidesaburo Hanafusa is a prominent researcher in the genetics of cancerous viruses. As explained by Fulvio Bardossi and Judith N. Schwartz in a Research Profile distributed by the Rockefeller University, Hanafusa "has used his training as a biochemist, combined with new insights and new technologies from molecular biology and genetics, to observe, isolate, control, and explain the events that occur and the elements that interact when virus meets cell." Hanafusa's early work with the Rous sarcoma virus (RSV), a virus that causes cancer in birds, has laid the foundation for a new hypothesis on how cancer may be caused by damaged genes--so-called "oncogenes"--within an organism's own cells. The oncogene theory proposes that genes have the potential to cause a normal cell to become cancerous. Hanafusa's current investigations at the Rockefeller University in New York City focuses on oncogenes and explores how they induce cellular transformation from a...