Cancer is terrible enough--still resisting cure 25 years after President Richard Nixon declared war on it, often intractably painful, and lamentably frequent. In 1994 the United States recorded 538,000 deaths from cancer, more than a fifth of the nation’s total. Yet bad as it is clinically, the fear it inspires magnifies its agony. We can’t trace cancer to any single agent or fateful event. It claws its way into existence out of the billions of complex interactions that make up our cellular biochemistry; its causes, as a decades-old drumbeat of research demonstrates, are myriad. Some are inherited--like the gene called BRCA-1, whose malfunction appears to be a component in many cases of breast cancer. But many are environmental and hence presumably avoidable: asbestos, infamously; tobacco; air pollution; a diet low in vegetables and fruits; alcohol; the ultraviolet radiation in sunlight.
If we could count out the dangers on the fingers ...
