On March 5, 1992, The New York Times carried an obituary for well-known actress Sandy Dennis, a cancer victim at fifty-four. That same day, the eighty-three-year-old actress Katharine Hepburn was enjoying her autobiography’s twenty-fifth week on the Times’s best-seller list. An obvious question is, Why did cancer strike Sandy Dennis? What caused her to miss out on the long life that her fellow actress enjoyed?
This obvious question is morally and medically a good one, but there is a more profound biological question: How is it possible that any of us can live several decades without dying of cancer? Cancerous cells are merely cells doing their normal thing: growing and proliferating. How could so many cells do such an abnormal thing as inhibit their growth for many decades? Obviously they must; otherwise everyone would die of cancer at an early age. This, of course, is the ultimate explanation. Those least likely to die at an early age, from any cause, will be most likely to survive, reproduce, and have their cancer-delaying adaptations at work in future generations. This sort of evolutionary explanation can help us understand the workings and origins of our cancer-preventing adaptations and the prodigious accomplishment they represent.
Confucius once said something like: A common man marvels at uncommon things; a wise man marvels at the commonplace. To marvel at the commonplace of not having cancer and at the mechanisms that make this possible may be the key to understanding how to make cancer even more uncommon.
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