Cancer Research from Bruce Ames of Cal Berkley

Inquiring minds are reading an older article on cancer, “Misconceptions about the causes of cancer…“. Why is this? Isn’t ‘cancer research’ time sensitive needing to be cutting-edge and up-to-the-second? Well, not always. Bruce Ames is “The Man” when it comes to research in this field. For one thing he discovered/invented the famed ‘white mouse’ experiment to extrapolate cancer causing data. This is an important policy paper (written in Nov. ’97) that should be revisited:

Despite a lack of convincing evidence that pollution is an important cause of human cancer, this misconception drives government policy today and results in billions of dollars spent to clean up minuscule amounts of synthetic chemicals, say two UC Berkeley researchers.

It is about choices of a limited resource…money:

This is only one of many misconceptions, they say, that serve to divert money from the most important causes of cancer: smoking, poor diet, our own hormones and chronic infections.

“One of the big misconceptions is that artificial chemicals such as pesticides have a lot to do with human cancer, but that’s just not true,” says Bruce N. Ames, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California at Berkeley and co-author of a new review of what is known about environmental pollution and cancer. “Nevertheless, it’s conventional wisdom and society spends billions on this each year.”

“We consume more carcinogens in one cup of coffee than we get from the pesticide residues on all the fruits and vegetables we eat in a year,” he adds.

Though there may be many excellent reasons for cleaning up pollution of our air, water and soil, the researchers say, prevention of cancer is not one of them.

Manmade or Naturemade?…

trace chemicals in the environment, such as pesticide residues on food, are not significant causes of human cancer, while the main causes are lifestyle factors.

“The problem is that lifestyle changes are tough,” says Gold, director of the Carcinogenic Potency Project at UC Berkeley’s National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences Center and a senior scientist in the cell and molecular biology division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

“But by targeting pesticide residues as a major problem, we risk making fruits and vegetables more expensive and indirectly increasing cancer risks, especially among the poor.”

The list of misconceptions are presented so well and you are urged to click on the link to see them yourself.