Healthy Living Can’t Prevent Cancer
But acknowledging the role of random bad luck should inspire more testing, research and treatments.
If normal life is a gradual march toward cancer, should more people be screened more often?
Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg
Recent news that random bad luck plays a big role in cancer has been misinterpreted as bad news, when it's actually very useful in helping humanity understand what cancer is and what can be done to prevent it.
New experiments attempt to quantify findings from 2015 and 2017 that showed random “bad luck” was a major factor in the development of cancer – along with inherited genetic predispositions and environmental carcinogens. An independent team this month showed that normal tissue is roiling with clusters of mutated cells, some of which have genetic errors common in cancer. This fits well with the current understanding that cancer starts when cells acquire a combination of genetic mutations that allows them to grow out of control.