There are no human actions to blame for most cancers. What we need is courage and grace | Editorial

Most cancers are not punishments or consequences of anything we can understand. Much can be done to cure them, but little to avoid them

The news that most cancers are caused by bad luck – or random failures of the DNA replication mechanism – need not be an occasion for fatalistic despair. Cancer is a dreadful disease. If there is any painless and ennobling way to die, it is certainly not the indignities, the uncertainty and the devouring pain of many forms of cancer. As George Orwell asked, “What weapon has man ever invented that even approaches in cruelty some of the common diseases?” Yet the suffering of cancer patients and their loved ones can only be increased by the assumption that all cancers, or even most, have an environmental cause and could be evaded by living right. They don’t, as this result makes clear. We should be grateful that so many cancers are cured, rather than hoping that all could be prevented.

There is something superstitious and ignoble in the attempt to attribute all forms of cancer to some cause that we could understand, as if fate were something that could be placated, and suffering only afflicted the insufficiently innocent. The victim of lung cancer is rather like the fundamentalist whose devout friends tell her that if she only had sufficient faith she would be cured. In both cases, blaming the victim gives their friends a sense that they have deserved their good luck. Yet for most cancers this is completely absurd. They happen or don’t according to their own laws and there is nothing that medicine or good resolutions can do to affect them. Even cancers that can largely be avoided by a change of behaviour – such as lung cancers – will still occasionally strike people who have done nothing to make them more likely.

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