5 ms·

Cancer Is More Bad Luck Than Bad Behavior, Study Says

70 points by svtrent 12y ago

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- digitalsushi 12y ago
  Is it definitely cancer that is rising dramatically, or is there possibly also our ability to become aware of cancer rising dramatically? Does new age media allow us to be aware of all things dramatically moreso than historically? It's a cheap retort to your statement on my part but I think valid enough to raise.
- mhurron 12y ago
  > Cancer has risen dramatically recently Has it? All I can find is http://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/cancer-prevalent-usa-another-myth-debunked/ http://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/cance... and http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/all.html http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/all.html The first says it's basically holding for everyone but the very old who weren't well represented 100 years ago, and the second seems to show a slight decline in the past ~20 or so years with a peak in 1975 and holding almost steady after that. Basically what you would expect with improved diagnosis.
- sp332 12y ago
  Do you have a source for this? Cancer incidence was steady in women and declined by 1.8% per year for men between 2007-2011. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8821931 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8821931 Did it get more prevalent in the last few years?
- jostmey 12y ago
  People now are less likely to die because of another reason, such as heart failure, and more likely to live long enough to die from cancer. That said, I would want to read the manuscript carefully before I accept its findings.
- dekhn 12y ago
  Don't forget, at least in the 1st world, far fewer people die from infectious diseases and accidents than they used to, but they still die, so increases in cancer rates (if they exist) can be explained without there being any specific environmental or lifestyle causes.
  - larrys 12y ago
    Add to that list heart disease. I'm sure most people know someone that could have died from heart problems prior to cancer becoming the cause of death much later in life. Also medical advances that prevent complications and in some cases death from diabetes.
    - dekhn 12y ago
      well, as general categories, cancer, heart and diabetes are the main non-accident reasons people die, for example in my country (US), and it's similar in most other countries. I see that trend as continuing (as a consequence of the nature of health care, and lifestyle). The actual details underlying the health trajectories of individuals (and then viewed in aggregate) are interesting, and the way we record cause of death, study deaths, (and the studies are then reported on) don't really capture the finer details in most cases.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- aaronem 12y ago
  Re the documentary: Interactions between human health and the human microbiome, especially the intestinal microbiome, are one of the hottest areas in the field of genomics right now, with recent publications suggesting a real and highly significant link between microbiome health and overall health; I don't have time at the moment to link references, but you should be able to find them pretty trivially via Google.
- aswanson 12y ago
  Maybe it's just being properly diagnosed more often. In the 1800s, it was just called "consumption."
  - jobposter1234 12y ago
    Consumption was actually tuberculosis. "Tuberculosis, MTB, or TB (short for tubercle bacillus), in the past also called phthisis, phthisis pulmonalis, or consumption, is a widespread, and in many cases fatal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis.[1]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculosis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculosis
- michaelelliot 12y ago
  I believe overall cancer incidence rates have risen while cancer mortality rates have fallen. Influencing factors could be improvements in the early detection of cancer and advancements in medicine for treating it. Another possible cause is the almost global increase in exposure to non-ionizing radiation from the ubiquity of wireless devices. The International Agency for Research on Cancer have stated that non-ionizing radiation could cause cancer in humans. [1] [1] http://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/pr/2011/pdfs/pr208_E.pdf http://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/pr/2011/pdfs/pr208_E.pdf
deleted 12y ago
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deleted 12y ago
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bitwize 12y ago
That's just what they want you to believe. They being Corporate America who profit enormously when you eat their processed foods, smoke their cigarettes, and take their drugs. Cancer is mainly caused by environmental toxins, so if you don't want to get cancer you have to detox: eat only raw paleo or vegan, cleanse with lemon juice or unsweetened tea four times a week, and for God's sakes man, DON'T BREATHE THE AIR!!!
deleted 12y ago
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deleted 12y ago
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6thSigma 12y ago
This is interesting, but dangerous. Smokers make up 90% of lung cancer deaths [1]. At some point you have to acknowledge that smoking definitely does something to influence lung cancer. [1] http://www.lung.org/stop-smoking/about-smoking/health-effects/smoking.html http://www.lung.org/stop-smoking/about-smoking/health-effect...
- cpncrunch 12y ago
  Also, exercise reduces colon cancer risk by 40-50% and breast cancer risk by 30-40%. Then there are other risk factors such as poor diet, insufficient vitamin D, etc. Overall it seems highly unlikely that cancer is mostly "bad luck". http://www.cancer.net/navigating-cancer-care/prevention-and-healthy-living/physical-activity/physical-activity-and-cancer-risk http://www.cancer.net/navigating-cancer-care/prevention-and-...
  - a_c_s 12y ago
    50% of what though? If you have 1 in a million chance, increasing that to 1.5 in a million isn't a big change. If "bad luck" afflicted 1 in 100,000 then then bad luck would still have a much bigger effect, despite lifestyle changes clearly being significant. (These numbers totally made up)
  - aridiculous 12y ago
    Do these percentages take into account causation vs correlation? Apparently (surprisingly), it's still very difficult to prove causation without a laboratory experiment. Perhaps people who are likely to exercise have a certain genetic disposition to begin with.
tokenadult 12y ago
I see the sole previous top-level comment here [edit: which has now been deleted] started out with a misstatement of fact. In fact, age-adjusted cancer death rates have been steadily dropping in the United States[1] and in general death rates from cancer and from other major causes of death have been decreasing throughout the developed world throughout my lifetime.[2] What that means in practical terms is that life expectancy at age 40, at age 60, and at even higher ages is still rising throughout the developed countries of the world, so if you have reached the age of 50, you can be ever more confident of reaching the age of 65, and if you reach the age of 65, you can be ever more confident of reaching the age of 80, and so on. It is possible for expanded cancer screening programs to produce the illusion that rates of age-adjusted cancer diagnosis have increased because of a real increase in cases of cancer,[3] but what is really going on with increased screening is increased detection of early cases of cancerous growths that eventually die off and never cause clinical disease. The human body has some defenses against cancer, and many cancers reach a growth dead-end not long after starting. Screening programs sometimes detect harmless cancers that don't need any treatment except watchful waiting. [1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/31/us-cancer-casualties-idUSKBN0K918220141231 http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/31/us-cancer-casualti... http://www.bloomberg.com/dataview/2014-04-17/how-americans-die.html http://www.bloomberg.com/dataview/2014-04-17/how-americans-d... http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_longevity/2013/09/life_expectancy_history_public_health_and_medical_advances_that_lead_to.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_... [2] http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box/scientificamerican0912-54_BX1.html http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box... [3] http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/recent-developments-and-recurring-dilemmas-in-cancer-screening-colon-lung-thyroid/ http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/recent-developments-and-...
UhUhUhUh 12y ago
Mutations do happen during replication. But is it random? How about underlying mechanisms involving telomeres or histones? Or something else.
noipv4 12y ago
We pin-pointed DNA double-strand breaks using sequencing, and found very high correlation with genes damaged by cancer. For e.g. the "ERG" gene which fuses with TMPRSS2 in prostate cancer was one of the genes in our list. http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/v10/n4/carousel/nmeth.2408-F4.jpg http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/v10/n4/carousel/nmeth.24... More research should reveal that it's more than just pure luck :)
xpda 12y ago
Different cancers are different. Skin cancer, both basal cell and melanoma, is usually caused by the sun. Other cancers have a very strong genetic correlation. This study did not consider the most common cancer in men, prostate cancer, or breast cancer. It's interesting that random cell division is such a strong factor in cancer, but it is completely incorrect to say that luck has a bigger effect than behavior for all types of cancer.
- mojoe 12y ago
  This is an excellent comment, but I want to point out that getting a cancer that has a strong genetic correlation is still "luck" rather than "behavior" from the perspective of a cancer patient.
  - kimdouglasmason 12y ago
    There is a major difference, which is that genetic correlations can be tested for, and a strong one can indicate that frequent testing is needed, catching cancers earlier when they're more treatable. For many cancers, catching them early is critical.
  - lukifer 12y ago
    The tricky thing with correlation is that behavior can still act as a "middle-man" for genetic correlation. For instance, a genetic susceptibility to addictive behavior could lead to higher rates of smoking, and therefore lung cancer. (While some of the more obvious factors might be corrected for, there's no way that all of them would be.)
- jeremiep 12y ago
  I once heard stress has a big role in cell division quality. Could it be they merely didn't take stress into account and credited luck instead?
thanatosmin 12y ago
There are a variety of basic errors in the interpretation of this study: http://ameyer.me/science/2015/01/02/vogel.html http://ameyer.me/science/2015/01/02/vogel.html
- thanatosmin 12y ago
  The tl;dr; version: this 65% number comes from a correlation coefficient on a log-log plot, which means the correlation coefficient has nothing to do with the actual fraction of cancer cases one can attribute to stem cell division numbers.
murbard2 12y ago
Here's a curve that represents the rate of cancer diagnosis by age in the UK. http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-info/cancerstats/incidence/age/#Cancer http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-info/cancerstats/inci... If cancer were only about a mutation happening randomly, you'd expect the curve to actually slope downwards, like an exponential distribution. But maybe cancer requires several mutations to happen in a row, which would suggest an Erlang distribution of which we only see the beginning of the hump. 20 mutations give a very good curve fit (1). An alternative hypothesis is senescence. Maybe the mutation rate itself increases with age, or maybe the immune system isn't as able to nip cancerous growths in the bud. This is important! Whenever the impact of a disease doesn't follow a chi squared or exponential distribution, it suggests two ways to fight the disease. Directly target the disease itself, or target the process which over time makes us more susceptible to it. (1) warning, back of the envelope, there are plenty of other effects to account
- revelation 12y ago
  That looks like a perfectly fine exponential distribution.
  - murbard2 12y ago
    No it doesn't. The exponential distribution p.d.f. is decreasing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_distribution#mediaviewer/File:Exponential_pdf.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_distribution#mediav...
    - revelation 12y ago
      But that's not what we are interested in, no? Nobody asks "whats the probability that you'll get cancer at precisely age x", they ask "what's the probabiblity that you'll have cancer by age x". I mean, we often can't even determine at what precise age the cancer developed. That's a problem for the PDF, not so much the CDF.
      - murbard2 12y ago
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
maj0rhn 12y ago
The Bloomberg article mis-interprets the scientific article. In effect, the scientific article shows how we could predict which tissues are most likely to become cancerous if we had no population statistics on cancer. That is, we could look at the rate of cell divisions in a tissue and say "Oh yeah, divisions occur frequently here, so there are going to be more cancers in this particular type of tissue." The scientific article does NOT say that the cancer which has arisen in random person X is mostly due to "bad luck" in person X. If person X smokes 4 packs of cigarettes per day, the person's risk of lung cancer is certainly affected. Of course, there is still some element of luck (not every heavy smoker gets lung cancer), but you can think of it like using loaded dice at the time of each DNA replication... loaded dice don't turn up snake eyes every time, but they certainly change the odds, and if you were playing craps there is no way you would want to use loaded dice. My reaction to the scientific article is... yawn. The result could have been predicted. Cancer is a disease of DNA replication. It makes sense that clinical problems arising from DNA replication would occur most often in places having the most DNA replication events. But it's nice to have experimental verification.
auton1 12y ago
This article misstates the finding of the research, as does much of the other coverage. A good explanation can be found here: http://www.theguardian.com/science/grrlscientist/2015/jan/02/bad-luck-bad-journalism-and-cancer-rates http://www.theguardian.com/science/grrlscientist/2015/jan/02...
- tokenadult 12y ago
  Thank you very much for that helpful link. If you submit it as a new submission to Hacker News, I'm sure I will not be alone in being glad to upvote it to main page visibility.
  - auton1 12y ago
    Thank you. Submitted.
goalo 12y ago
Immune system kills spontaneous blood cancer cells every day - http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/272092.php http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/272092.php

70 points by svtrent 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

digitalsushi 12y ago
Is it definitely cancer that is rising dramatically, or is there possibly also our ability to become aware of cancer rising dramatically? Does new age media allow us to be aware of all things dramatically moreso than historically? It's a cheap retort to your statement on my part but I think valid enough to raise.
mhurron 12y ago
> Cancer has risen dramatically recently Has it? All I can find is http://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/cancer-prevalent-usa-another-myth-debunked/ http://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/cance... and http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/all.html http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/all.html The first says it's basically holding for everyone but the very old who weren't well represented 100 years ago, and the second seems to show a slight decline in the past ~20 or so years with a peak in 1975 and holding almost steady after that. Basically what you would expect with improved diagnosis.
sp332 12y ago
Do you have a source for this? Cancer incidence was steady in women and declined by 1.8% per year for men between 2007-2011. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8821931 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8821931 Did it get more prevalent in the last few years?
jostmey 12y ago
People now are less likely to die because of another reason, such as heart failure, and more likely to live long enough to die from cancer. That said, I would want to read the manuscript carefully before I accept its findings.
dekhn 12y ago
Don't forget, at least in the 1st world, far fewer people die from infectious diseases and accidents than they used to, but they still die, so increases in cancer rates (if they exist) can be explained without there being any specific environmental or lifestyle causes.
- larrys 12y ago
  Add to that list heart disease. I'm sure most people know someone that could have died from heart problems prior to cancer becoming the cause of death much later in life. Also medical advances that prevent complications and in some cases death from diabetes.
  - dekhn 12y ago
    well, as general categories, cancer, heart and diabetes are the main non-accident reasons people die, for example in my country (US), and it's similar in most other countries. I see that trend as continuing (as a consequence of the nature of health care, and lifestyle). The actual details underlying the health trajectories of individuals (and then viewed in aggregate) are interesting, and the way we record cause of death, study deaths, (and the studies are then reported on) don't really capture the finer details in most cases.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
aaronem 12y ago
Re the documentary: Interactions between human health and the human microbiome, especially the intestinal microbiome, are one of the hottest areas in the field of genomics right now, with recent publications suggesting a real and highly significant link between microbiome health and overall health; I don't have time at the moment to link references, but you should be able to find them pretty trivially via Google.
aswanson 12y ago
Maybe it's just being properly diagnosed more often. In the 1800s, it was just called "consumption."
- jobposter1234 12y ago
  Consumption was actually tuberculosis. "Tuberculosis, MTB, or TB (short for tubercle bacillus), in the past also called phthisis, phthisis pulmonalis, or consumption, is a widespread, and in many cases fatal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis.[1]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculosis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculosis
michaelelliot 12y ago
I believe overall cancer incidence rates have risen while cancer mortality rates have fallen. Influencing factors could be improvements in the early detection of cancer and advancements in medicine for treating it. Another possible cause is the almost global increase in exposure to non-ionizing radiation from the ubiquity of wireless devices. The International Agency for Research on Cancer have stated that non-ionizing radiation could cause cancer in humans. [1] [1] http://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/pr/2011/pdfs/pr208_E.pdf http://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/pr/2011/pdfs/pr208_E.pdf

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

bitwize 12y ago

That's just what they want you to believe. They being Corporate America who profit enormously when you eat their processed foods, smoke their cigarettes, and take their drugs. Cancer is mainly caused by environmental toxins, so if you don't want to get cancer you have to detox: eat only raw paleo or vegan, cleanse with lemon juice or unsweetened tea four times a week, and for God's sakes man, DON'T BREATHE THE AIR!!!

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

6thSigma 12y ago

This is interesting, but dangerous. Smokers make up 90% of lung cancer deaths [1]. At some point you have to acknowledge that smoking definitely does something to influence lung cancer. [1] http://www.lung.org/stop-smoking/about-smoking/health-effects/smoking.html http://www.lung.org/stop-smoking/about-smoking/health-effect...

cpncrunch 12y ago
Also, exercise reduces colon cancer risk by 40-50% and breast cancer risk by 30-40%. Then there are other risk factors such as poor diet, insufficient vitamin D, etc. Overall it seems highly unlikely that cancer is mostly "bad luck". http://www.cancer.net/navigating-cancer-care/prevention-and-healthy-living/physical-activity/physical-activity-and-cancer-risk http://www.cancer.net/navigating-cancer-care/prevention-and-...
- a_c_s 12y ago
  50% of what though? If you have 1 in a million chance, increasing that to 1.5 in a million isn't a big change. If "bad luck" afflicted 1 in 100,000 then then bad luck would still have a much bigger effect, despite lifestyle changes clearly being significant. (These numbers totally made up)
- aridiculous 12y ago
  Do these percentages take into account causation vs correlation? Apparently (surprisingly), it's still very difficult to prove causation without a laboratory experiment. Perhaps people who are likely to exercise have a certain genetic disposition to begin with.

tokenadult 12y ago

I see the sole previous top-level comment here [edit: which has now been deleted] started out with a misstatement of fact. In fact, age-adjusted cancer death rates have been steadily dropping in the United States[1] and in general death rates from cancer and from other major causes of death have been decreasing throughout the developed world throughout my lifetime.[2] What that means in practical terms is that life expectancy at age 40, at age 60, and at even higher ages is still rising throughout the developed countries of the world, so if you have reached the age of 50, you can be ever more confident of reaching the age of 65, and if you reach the age of 65, you can be ever more confident of reaching the age of 80, and so on. It is possible for expanded cancer screening programs to produce the illusion that rates of age-adjusted cancer diagnosis have increased because of a real increase in cases of cancer,[3] but what is really going on with increased screening is increased detection of early cases of cancerous growths that eventually die off and never cause clinical disease. The human body has some defenses against cancer, and many cancers reach a growth dead-end not long after starting. Screening programs sometimes detect harmless cancers that don't need any treatment except watchful waiting. [1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/31/us-cancer-casualties-idUSKBN0K918220141231 http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/31/us-cancer-casualti... http://www.bloomberg.com/dataview/2014-04-17/how-americans-die.html http://www.bloomberg.com/dataview/2014-04-17/how-americans-d... http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_longevity/2013/09/life_expectancy_history_public_health_and_medical_advances_that_lead_to.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_... [2] http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box/scientificamerican0912-54_BX1.html http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box... [3] http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/recent-developments-and-recurring-dilemmas-in-cancer-screening-colon-lung-thyroid/ http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/recent-developments-and-...

UhUhUhUh 12y ago

Mutations do happen during replication. But is it random? How about underlying mechanisms involving telomeres or histones? Or something else.

noipv4 12y ago

We pin-pointed DNA double-strand breaks using sequencing, and found very high correlation with genes damaged by cancer. For e.g. the "ERG" gene which fuses with TMPRSS2 in prostate cancer was one of the genes in our list. http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/v10/n4/carousel/nmeth.2408-F4.jpg http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/v10/n4/carousel/nmeth.24... More research should reveal that it's more than just pure luck :)

xpda 12y ago

Different cancers are different. Skin cancer, both basal cell and melanoma, is usually caused by the sun. Other cancers have a very strong genetic correlation. This study did not consider the most common cancer in men, prostate cancer, or breast cancer. It's interesting that random cell division is such a strong factor in cancer, but it is completely incorrect to say that luck has a bigger effect than behavior for all types of cancer.

mojoe 12y ago
This is an excellent comment, but I want to point out that getting a cancer that has a strong genetic correlation is still "luck" rather than "behavior" from the perspective of a cancer patient.
- kimdouglasmason 12y ago
  There is a major difference, which is that genetic correlations can be tested for, and a strong one can indicate that frequent testing is needed, catching cancers earlier when they're more treatable. For many cancers, catching them early is critical.
- lukifer 12y ago
  The tricky thing with correlation is that behavior can still act as a "middle-man" for genetic correlation. For instance, a genetic susceptibility to addictive behavior could lead to higher rates of smoking, and therefore lung cancer. (While some of the more obvious factors might be corrected for, there's no way that all of them would be.)
jeremiep 12y ago
I once heard stress has a big role in cell division quality. Could it be they merely didn't take stress into account and credited luck instead?

thanatosmin 12y ago

There are a variety of basic errors in the interpretation of this study: http://ameyer.me/science/2015/01/02/vogel.html http://ameyer.me/science/2015/01/02/vogel.html

thanatosmin 12y ago
The tl;dr; version: this 65% number comes from a correlation coefficient on a log-log plot, which means the correlation coefficient has nothing to do with the actual fraction of cancer cases one can attribute to stem cell division numbers.

murbard2 12y ago

Here's a curve that represents the rate of cancer diagnosis by age in the UK. http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-info/cancerstats/incidence/age/#Cancer http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-info/cancerstats/inci... If cancer were only about a mutation happening randomly, you'd expect the curve to actually slope downwards, like an exponential distribution. But maybe cancer requires several mutations to happen in a row, which would suggest an Erlang distribution of which we only see the beginning of the hump. 20 mutations give a very good curve fit (1). An alternative hypothesis is senescence. Maybe the mutation rate itself increases with age, or maybe the immune system isn't as able to nip cancerous growths in the bud. This is important! Whenever the impact of a disease doesn't follow a chi squared or exponential distribution, it suggests two ways to fight the disease. Directly target the disease itself, or target the process which over time makes us more susceptible to it. (1) warning, back of the envelope, there are plenty of other effects to account

revelation 12y ago
That looks like a perfectly fine exponential distribution.
- murbard2 12y ago
  No it doesn't. The exponential distribution p.d.f. is decreasing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_distribution#mediaviewer/File:Exponential_pdf.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_distribution#mediav...
  - revelation 12y ago
    But that's not what we are interested in, no? Nobody asks "whats the probability that you'll get cancer at precisely age x", they ask "what's the probabiblity that you'll have cancer by age x". I mean, we often can't even determine at what precise age the cancer developed. That's a problem for the PDF, not so much the CDF.
    - murbard2 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

maj0rhn 12y ago

The Bloomberg article mis-interprets the scientific article. In effect, the scientific article shows how we could predict which tissues are most likely to become cancerous if we had no population statistics on cancer. That is, we could look at the rate of cell divisions in a tissue and say "Oh yeah, divisions occur frequently here, so there are going to be more cancers in this particular type of tissue." The scientific article does NOT say that the cancer which has arisen in random person X is mostly due to "bad luck" in person X. If person X smokes 4 packs of cigarettes per day, the person's risk of lung cancer is certainly affected. Of course, there is still some element of luck (not every heavy smoker gets lung cancer), but you can think of it like using loaded dice at the time of each DNA replication... loaded dice don't turn up snake eyes every time, but they certainly change the odds, and if you were playing craps there is no way you would want to use loaded dice. My reaction to the scientific article is... yawn. The result could have been predicted. Cancer is a disease of DNA replication. It makes sense that clinical problems arising from DNA replication would occur most often in places having the most DNA replication events. But it's nice to have experimental verification.

auton1 12y ago

This article misstates the finding of the research, as does much of the other coverage. A good explanation can be found here: http://www.theguardian.com/science/grrlscientist/2015/jan/02/bad-luck-bad-journalism-and-cancer-rates http://www.theguardian.com/science/grrlscientist/2015/jan/02...

tokenadult 12y ago
Thank you very much for that helpful link. If you submit it as a new submission to Hacker News, I'm sure I will not be alone in being glad to upvote it to main page visibility.
- auton1 12y ago
  Thank you. Submitted.

goalo 12y ago

Immune system kills spontaneous blood cancer cells every day - http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/272092.php http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/272092.php