TERT and cancer: Escape from telomeric crisis, in culture or in cancer development, requires telomere maintenance, which permits immortality and which is usually achieved, either as a rare natural event (in cancers) or artificially, by upregulated expression of telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT), the catalytic subunit of telomerase (Bennett, 2008; Bond et al., 1999; DePinho and Polyak, 2004; Newbold, 2002; Wynford-Thomas, 1999).