Editorial: Cancer: mixed messages, common purpose (Lancet)

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On Jan 2, a research paper published in Science by Cristian Tomasetti and Bert Vogelstein proclaimed that most individual cancers, 65%, could be attributed to “bad luck”—random events such as errors in DNA replication—rather than to environmental or inherited risk factors. This eyecatching message has drawn comment, partly because of the inbuilt uncertainty in the study's methods and headline estimate (with its 95% confidence interval of 39–81) and partly because of the conclusion's incompatibility with public health evidence and thinking......