I was going to ask about this number, because it seems high enough to be statistically improbable, but back-of-the-envelope arithmetic says otherwise: there are about 10 cases of pancreatic cancer per 100,000 people per year [1], so let's say each person has a 1 in 10,000 chance of a diagnosis each year. If you know somebody for 50 years, there's a 1 in 200 chance they receive a diagnosis in that time, so you'd expect to need to know 2000 people to eventually know 10 diagnosed people. 2000 is a lot, but "knowing" a person is a pretty loose term, and pancreatic cancer has a miserably high death rate within 5 years, so it's unfortunately plausible.