Comment by carbocation | Hacker News Reader

Comment by carbocation | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This document is both a political document and, to a lesser extent, a scientific one.

On the political front, the document encourages people to reject that cancer predilection is stochastic and to encourage the continued study of cancer.

The scientific component attempts to provide an underpinning to the political goal. It uses a handful of epidemiological examples, such as the climbing incidence of colorectal cancer in Japan over a genetically-insignificant timescale (which suggests an environmental factor at play).

The article fails to support its headline ('Most types of cancer not due to "bad luck"') through any scientific instrument. While its policy goal (the continued pursuit of the causes of cancer) is reasonable, nobody is saying that we now know that cancer is predominantly caused by bad luck so we should stop studying it (certainly not Vogelstein, whose career is built on the study of cancer).

Overall, it's not clear to me why this was published.

The cancer research and cancer epidemiology communities do not really talk to each other (as a cancer researcher for many years I have never been to an epidemiology seminar despite working in a 'cancer center'). So it is really a fight for money and mind influence. Most cancer researchers lean towards drugs targeting molecular mechanisms of cancer, cancer epidemiologists, on the other hand, aim for political decisions that combat environmental factors. Where should most money go? what should be discussed in the media?

Vogelstein proposes a simple model that explains a lot of data. Sure, the implications are bleak, but the scientists I talked to were not really surprised that it finally got out.

>> as a cancer researcher...

Iodine. Have you looked into it? The abstracts over on nih.gov are pretty interesting - google for "iodine cancer nih" without quotes. I'm curious what a cancer researcher has to say. Mostly I'm interested in weather your peer group has even looked at this.

> your peer group has even looked at this.

I think it will help most if I explain the incentives for scientists (at least in the US). From their first day in the lab scientists are rewarded most for generating data and making discoveries. The more novel and paradigm shifting the discovery the better - as it opens the door to high-impact publications and future research money. But "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" and the more unexpected the finding the more difficult it is to convince your peers and get it published.

Somewhat idealistically, this has two consequences for a good lead scientist: 1) hew will guide his lab to explore the unexplored 2) and subject the most novel and promising findings to the most stringent experimental verification.

So the answer to your direct question - yes probably someone somewhere tried to test the iodine-breast cancer hypothesis, but since it is not a major topic in breast cancer research the experiments have probably failed and were not published and thus independently replicated

Overall, it's not clear to me why this was published.

The fifth paragraph explains why it was published:

“Concluding that ‘bad luck’ is the major cause of cancer would be misleading and may detract from efforts to identify the causes of the disease and effectively prevent it.”

It's fairly obvious that if a study tells people most cancers are caused by bad luck and not bad actions, there will be some subset of the population that rationalizes their bad actions through such a study. If the study is inaccurate it could then actually cause additional cancers through misinformation.

> "if a study tells people most cancers are caused by bad luck and not bad actions"

Something to take into consideration. As far as I remember the original article talked about most "types" of cancers and it didn't refer to cancer cases. By volume, some cancers are common and very likely to have an environmental cause.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com