this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2024
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Definitely. Something like 2/3 of cancer is luck for example.
Our immune system is constantly euthanising cancerous cells because they happen all the time. To "get" cancer, it has to miss the cell and let it grow to be noticeable. Lots of (bad) luck involved!
However, I'd be carefully putting numbers on it. There's not really a difference between cancer appearing to be luck vs we don't understand the risk factors. I'd guess that 2/3 luck would become 1/3 over the next 50 or 100 years as we understand risk factors better. Also I'm not really sure how you quantify the amount of luck when risk factors increase the chances, rather that directly causing it. In that sense you could say cancer is 100% luck.
A doctor once pointed out to me that every time there is cell replenishment, there's a possibility of cancer. 😶
I'm recuperating from a journey at the moment and too lazy to battle the newly terible search engine capabilities to find the articles I got the number from but as I understand it cancer scientists were pointing out that around 60- something percent of cancers in the body cannot be accounted for by environmental factors (diet, pollutants etc) once you control for those risk factors. Obviously it varies by cancer type, but this was the general estimate.
I think you're right that knowledge will increase but I think chance is worth bearing in mind because I think knowledge of external risks (and internal ones, like a bunch of missing immune cells) tends to be overstated in our thinking. Someone I knew with leukemia was the healthiest most clean living person I've ever met and I got so tired of people asking me what he had done to get it.
Maybe in 100 years cancer drugs will be the new paracetamol.
"Take this drug, it prevents cancer"
"How does it work?"
"We have some theories, but really we have no idea. It just does."
That's a cool idea!
There are so many drugs sort of like that rn. They get approved for one thing and then end up being approved for something totally different because it turns out they seem to do this other thing because reasons.
Found out the other day people are using low dose lithium of all things for cardiovascular health.
It kinda makes sense, since studies are more often "some people are getting better and we think it might be X, maybe, lets give it to 1000 people and measure against a control to see if it works" than they are "we understand the interactions in detail and based on how they interact it's certain to cure it".
Definitely, there's also what I think of as the Listerine factor.
(The people who invented Listerine had no idea what to do with it. They wanted doctors to wash their hands in it, then they tried to market it as a floor cleaner. Finally they worked out they could sell it as a cure for bad breath if they called bad breath a scarier name, "halitosis").
Haha yes. More generalised, everyone assumes that others know what they are doing but really everyone is just making it up as they go along.
Not everyone though surely. At the other end of the scale there's stuff like scientists trying to create a compound that will cause a very specific molecular behaviour in a particular set of blood vessels.
I bet it is everyone 😆. I bet if you ask those scientists, they would say they have a general idea of what should work but within that scope they are just trying things too see if they work.
I don't mean everyone has no idea what they are doing, but that there's a bit of "I have no idea what I'm doing" in everyone (whether they realise it or not).
I get what you mean now. Totally agree. There's an element of creativity in STEM and creativity itself has an element of chaos.
On a related tangent there's the idea of vocation - the people who most seem to know what they are doing tend to be doing it because they are "driven" or it "comes naturally" and both those things are essentially black box.
I'll counter that with the Peter Principle 😆
Fair point, we have all met plenty of those!