The Armitage–Doll model is a statistical model of carcinogenesis, proposed in 1954 by Peter Armitage and Richard Doll, in which a series of discrete mutations result in cancer.
[1] The original paper has recently been reprinted with a set of commentary articles.
The rate of incidence and mortality from a wide variety of common cancers follows a power law: someone's risk of developing a cancer increases with a power of their age.
[1] This is now widely accepted, and part of the mainstream view of carcinogenesis.
Other cancers were later discovered to require fewer mutations: retinoblastoma, typically emerging in early childhood, can emerge from as few as 1 or 2, depending on pre-existing genetic factors.
This was some of the earliest strong evidence that cancer was the result of an accumulation of mutations.
With their 1954 paper, Armitage and Doll began a line of research that led to Knudson's two-hit hypothesis and thus the discovery of tumour suppressor genes.