There’s a video of cities at night up on Youtube. As beautiful as they say the cities are, one thing that struck me is the similarity in shape of some of the cities to tumors. This surprised me, since cities grow according to planned rules and tumors do not. Perhaps the conditions required for growth dictate a certain shape? Certainly the individual structures have analogues – blood vessels and roads, for example, both carry vital nutrients for their respective growths.

The interesting question is whether we can use any studies on the growth of cities to come up with tumor growth models as well, or even whether certain factors that plague cities could also be used to fight cancer.