A major scientific study grabbed headlines recently, and the implications of its findings may affect many of us, if not all of us. In a paper published in Science by Cristian Tomasetti, Lu Li and Bert Vogelstein of Johns Hopkins University, the authors report that nearly two-thirds of known cancer-causing mutations can be attributed to random mistakes that occur during DNA replication. In other words, the vast majority of these mutations occur in a spontaneous, uncontrollable way— it may not matter how you live your life, or what measures you take to decrease your chance of developing cancer. As the authors and the press put it, it really just comes down to luck.
Disturbing? For many, yes. It’s not easy to accept that one’s luck in activities such as winning the lottery may also apply to whether or not you will be touched by cancer. That is partly why this study is gaining so much attention.
As the authors explain in their publication, until now most cancer-causing mutations had been attributed to two major sources: inherited and environmental factors. But they found that a third kind of mutation, replicative (R) mutations that arise from unavoidable errors associated with DNA replication, account for 66 percent of cancer-causing mutations.Continue reading “The Randomness of Cancer”