BAD LUCK

With Viv Hailwood, on a grassy hike

Yorkshire Dales National Park

Francis Collins is the Director of NIH (National Institutes of Health).  That makes him a very important man.  No doubt most of his time is taken up by mulling such questions as “How in hell are we going to survive Trump's budget cuts?”  However, he still has time to write an occasional blog explaining some new medical wrinkle to the likes of you and me.  His latest is quite interesting:

https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2017/04/04/random-mutations-play-major-role-in-cancer/

Nutshell:  Recently published research by biostat folks at Johns Hopkins teases out the role of random chance (aka bad luck) in acquiring cancer.  As you know, every time a cell divides and its DNA is duplicated, errors occur.  The body goes to heroic lengths to find those errors and fix them.  However, some get through.  If the error disables, say, a tumor-suppressor gene, a cancer may ensue.  Bad luck.

It turns out that bad luck is the major source of cancers:  66%.  Environmental factors (e.g., smoking) accounts for 29%, while heredity is responsible for only 5%.  Of course, that is for cancer sensu latu; individual cancers vary significantly.  Ovarian seems to be in the middle of the pack. 

Dr. Collins ends with an obvious observation: since we can’t prevent random mutation, we had better work hard on early detection and cure.