Ruth Alexander
speaker
4,250 appearances
120 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2011
last heard Aug 2018
Ruth Alexander’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And the researchers say they've calculated that two thirds of cancer variation is down to bad luck.
Many media reports have simply concluded that this means that two-thirds of cancer cases are the result of bad luck, a random cell division gone wrong, and that these cases have no genetic component and can't be prevented by stopping smoking or improving your diet.
We've read countless articles and blog posts by statistically savvy people and experts in this field, and the problem is they don't all agree.
So they're using the analogy of... Getting cancer is like getting in a car and going on a trip, they're saying.
Right.
But look, this paragraph, the next paragraph, they say we can't say that two-thirds of accidents are caused solely by the length of the trip.
And if all the dots lined up perfectly, there'd be a 100% relationship between cell division... Bad luck.
...and cancer.
And the answer is somewhere in between.
The dots on the graph line up pretty well, so the rate of cell division is about two-thirds correlated with the rate of cancer.
So we think maybe that's what the researchers mean.
Ah, Tim, I've got news.
What?
I've just received a reply to my emails from one of the authors, Christian Tomasetti.
He says he's writing a technical paper to explain his previous paper.
What do you reckon?
I really don't think so.
It'll never catch on.
Most cases of cancer are the result of sheer bad luck.
So there are genetic factors behind cancer.
Showing 1001–1020 of 4,250 · page 51 of 213
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