  Cancer has been characterized as a constellation of hundreds of diseases
differing in underlying mutations and depending on cellular environments.
Carcinogenesis as a stochastic physical process has been studied for over sixty
years, but there is no accepted standard model. We show that the hazard rates
of all cancers are characterized by a simple dynamic stochastic process on a
half-line, with a universal linear restoring force balancing a universal simple
Brownian motion starting from a universal initial distribution. Only a critical
radius defining the transition from normal to tumorigenic genomes distinguishes
between different cancer types when time is measured in cell--cycle units.
Reparametrizing to chronological time units introduces two additional
parameters: the onset of cellular senescence with age and the time interval
over which this cessation in replication takes place. This universality implies
that there may exist a finite separation between normal cells and tumorigenic
cells in all tissue types that may be a viable target for both early detection
and preventive therapy.
