LONDON: Earlier this year, Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist in Stockholm, made the jarring suggestion that dark matter might cause cancer. She was not talking about the “dark matter” of the genome (another term for junk DNA) but about the hypothetical, lightless particles that cosmologists believe pervade the universe and hold the galaxies together.
Though it has yet to be directly detected, dark matter is presumed to exist because we can see the effects of its gravity. As its invisible particles pass through our bodies, they could be mutating DNA, the theory goes, adding at an extremely low level to the overall rate of cancer.
It was unsettling to see two such seemingly different realms, cosmology and oncology, suddenly juxtaposed. But that was just the beginning. Shortly after Dr. Hossenfelder broached her idea in an online essay, Michael Rampino, a professor at New York University, added geology and paleontology to the picture.
Dark matter, he proposed in an article for the Royal Astronomical Society, is responsible for the mass extinctions that have periodically swept Earth, including the one that killed the dinosaurs.
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