Karl Krueger

Karl Krueger, PhD, is a retired program director from the Division of Cancer Prevention at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the NIH. He earned his PhD in biochemistry from Vanderbilt University in 1981 and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the NIH. Krueger then joined the faculty of Georgetown University School of Medicine, where he taught neuroanatomy and conducted neuroscience research. In 2004, he moved to the National Cancer Institute where, as a program director, he was involved in funding decisions for grant proposals and initiated his own research programs, notably one focusing on cancer biomarkers based on carbohydrate structures that ran for over 15 years. He retired from the NCI at the end of 2022 and has since published two ID-inspired papers on the molecular causes of cancer, drawing on his expertise in cancer genomics.

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What Cancer Reveals About the Limits of Darwinian Evolutionary Processes

Karl Krueger
August 27, 2025
We all know people who have suffered with cancer. It's a major affliction of our modern world and many scientists are studying it closely to find a cure. Karl Krueger is one such scientist who has spent much of his career in cancer research. Today, host Casey Luskin speaks with Krueger about his work and what cancer can teach us about the limits of Darwinian processes. In his tenure at the National Cancer Institute, Krueger had a front-row seat to cancer research progress. After reviewing countless research projects and mountains of data, Krueger learned that cancer doesn't create new features at the molecular leveI, it degrades them. And breakage of aboriginal design is a hallmark of Darwinian processes. Krueger explains in this illuminating discussion.