Medicine

More from yesterday- but no autism, this time

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You know we all think that folks who die from lung cancer just couldn’t stop smoking. Because we’ve been programmed to believe that.

Don’t get me wrong. Smoking will provide you with a wealth of opportunity to die from lung cancer, mouth cancer, or even emphysema. But, there are a significant number of folks (nowhere near a majority, however) who develop lung cancer and never touched a cigarette or cigar in their lives.

From AAAS Science (direct link)

Now, long after Wigler’s work (see yesterday’s blog) became known, Drs. Christian Tomasetti [Johns Hopkins] and Bert Vogelstein [Howard Hughes Medical Institute] have published a matching piece of research in Science (AAAS Science ). They report that genetic mutations that randomly occur when stem cells divide are a major cause of most cancers. (Note that this research specifically excluded breast and prostate cancers- because these cancers have strong genetic indicators. There are also lifestyle factors like smoking and sun exposure that clearly lead to lung, skin and other tissue cancers.)

Amazingly, these researchers report that 2/3 of the increased cancer risks are due to these stochastic mutations of DNA. (Only 1/3 of the risks can be attributed to hereditary and/or environmental factors.) This is akin to Wigler’s theory that it’s stochastic, de novo mutations in vast regions of our chromosomes that create the cancerous growths- and, as I reported yesterday [link found above], probably autism.

You should know that, while at low numbers in relation to other cells, stems cells exist in most tissues. It is these stem cells that are capable of producing a tumor. (The function of said stems cells are to divide and grow to replenish or repair damaged cells during our lifetime. They are also the cells that scientists occasionally play with to produce pluripotent stem cells to create new organs from scratch.)

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15 thoughts on “More from yesterday- but no autism, this time”

  3. FYI. “Stochastic” is simply an adjective usually describing some “process”. It means “probabilistic”, not “random” as your authority Ackerman would imply. For example by opposition, the sun rising every day is consider to be a “deterministic” process (vs. stochastic). Probabilities can be affected (through cause and effect) by various influential processes (hopefully measurable). On its face, DNA mutations would seem highly likely to be linked to cancer. That they are random (and thus unfathomable) is far from clear. The research cited is well-intentioned, but far from edifying. It remains a huge problem, hopefully solvable by science and not left to gods of chance.

    1. “Randomly determined; having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analyzed statistically but may not be predicted precisely” is the definition of stochastic. It is precisely the reason these researchers (and not I) chose the term. It does not mean probabilistic, which would to a scientist would mean that it could be predicted how and when it would occur.
      Why is it that the random mutations are far from clear? The only piece that is far from clear to me is why some folks’ DNA regions are less prone to these stochastic changes than others.

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