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Most targeted cancer drugs work like tranquilizer darts, snaring an overzealous gene that has spurred the cell into murderously rapid growth.

But many tumors don’t have a hyperactive gene. Like the mayhem in “Cat in the Hat,” they are enabled by parental absence. They grow because the genes that are meant to provide discipline, guiding the activity of other genes or self-destructing a cell whose DNA is too damaged, are broken or missing.

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These tumors have bedeviled researchers for decades. Restoring or fixing a protein is far harder than breaking it. And that’s bad news for humanity: Cancer is far more likely to be caused by such “tumor-suppressor” genes than by one gene run amok. 

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