Cancer and bad luck

When people get cancer, they and everyone involved with them want to know how and why. A groundbreaking study recently published in the journal Science and performed by Dr. Bert Vogelstein of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore and Johns Hopkins biomathematician Cristian Tomasetti claims that it's just plain old bad luck!

Their study found that two-thirds of cancer incidence of various types can be blamed on random mutations and not heredity or risky habits like smoking. In these cases, they blamed the development of cancer on random DNA mutations accumulating in various parts of the body during ordinary cell division rather than risky behavior.

They looked at 31 cancer types and found that 22 of them could be explained largely by these random mutations-essentially biological bad luck.

Dr. Vogelstein said the real reason for cancer in many cases "is not because you didn't behave well or were exposed to some bad environmental influence, it's just because you were unlucky."

Mr. Tomasetti said harmful mutations occur for "no particular reason other than randomness" as the body's stem cells divide in various tissues. He says the answer to the problem is focusing more research and resources on finding ways to detect such cancers at early, curable stages. (msn.com medical)

The bottom line here is that two thirds of all cancers don't happen because of poor lifestyle choices or risky behaviors; they occur at random which means you either have good luck if you don't develop cancer and bad luck if you do.

That has been an intuition of mine for a long time. As much as medicine would like to explain everything that happens to us, they just can't. People who smoke four packs of cigarettes a day never get lung cancer and people who have never smoked at all do. The flu vaccine doesn't work for a lot of people. Surgery doesn't cure every problem. And the list goes on and on. There's still a lot more about the world we don't understand than we do.

And all of us know about luck. Some people have extraordinary good luck and others have incredible bad luck. There's the old saying that if that person didn't have bad luck, he wouldn't have any luck at all. Some people walk around like there's a dark cloud hanging over their head wherever they go because if anything bad can happen to them, it almost surely will. Other people seem to get whatever they want.

If you win the lottery, you're lucky, if you don't, you're not. If you get the girl of your dreams you're lucky, if someone else gets her, you're not. These things and many other things in our lives aren't predicated on hard work, knowhow, education, intelligence, drive or any other characteristics that we link to success. A lottery drawing is a series of random numbers and we either get them all right or we don't. There's absolutely no mathematical way to determine what 6 random numbers are going to show up during the next drawing. It's pure luck.

Even finding the girl of your dreams and marrying her is more luck than anything else. Imagine two souls out of the billions of souls on this planet meeting each other, falling in love and living happily ever after. The odds against that happening are staggering but it happens to some. And when it does, we often hear one or the other or both say that they're they luckiest person in the world to have found their soulmate.

We don't know how luck works. We don't know why luck seems to smile on some and frown on others. We don't really know anything about luck at all except we know it's real.

And we all hope lady luck is smiling on us.