Free The Cancer Chronicles by George Johnson Page B

more cancer now than in the past, and a few weeks later she sent me a reference toan article that had just appeared in
Nature Reviews Cancer
in which two Egyptologists concluded that there is “a striking rarity of malignancies” in ancient times.In a news release from her university, one of the authors,A. Rosalie David, made this claim:
    In industrialised societies, cancer is second only to cardiovascular disease as a cause of death. But in ancient times, it was extremely rare. There is nothing in the natural environment that can cause cancer. So it has to be a man-made disease, down to pollution and changes to our diet and lifestyle.
    …We can make very clear statements on the cancer ratesin societies because we have a full overview. We have looked at millennia, not one hundred years, and have masses of data.
    Across the Internet, news reports jumped on theinformation: “Cancer Is a Man-Made Disease.” “Cure for Cancer: Live in Ancient Times.” By now I thought I had become familiar with the literature. Was there some important new evidence that had resolved the ambiguities? It was flat out wrong to say that nothing in the natural environment can cause cancer. What about sunlight, radium,aflatoxin,hepatitis virus, humanpapillomavirus? I kept checking the university website assuming there would be a correction. None ever came.
    The paper itself turned out to be more sober and qualified, and as I went through it line by line, I saw that nothing there was new. The authors had taken the same body of research I’d been wading through all winter and given it their own spin. While two hundred serendipitously documented cancer cases seem like a significant amount to most paleopathologists,some take the number at face value, envisioning an idyllic cancer-free past: a world where it was far less likely forchildren to getosteosarcoma or for even the very aged to getbreast,prostate, or any of the cancers we worry about today. A world free from the attack of modern times. One can find consolation in fatalism, the idea that cancer is an inevitable part of the biological process. But there is also comfort in believing that humans, through their own devices, have increased the likelihood of cancer. What free-willed creatures have created can conceivably be undone. Failing that, there is at least a culprit to blame.
    As I flashed back and forth between these opposing views, I was reminded of an optical illusion that at one moment looks like a beautiful young woman and the next moment like a crooked-nosed hag. With so little good data to go on, people see what they hope to see.
    Seeking perspective, I wondered what fraction of the human bone pile had actually been picked. I asked three anthropologists to estimatethe total number of ancient and prehistoric skeletons that have been discovered over the years and made available for study by theworld’s scientists. Perhaps 250,000, I was told, not much more than the population of a small city. That includes partial skeletons—and often only single skulls, which were the only bones many early anthropologists thought worth saving. Very few of the specimens have been scrutinized for cancer.
    Take this number and compare it with the total number of people who have ever lived and died.A demographer at thePopulation Reference Bureau made a rough calculation. By A.D. 1, the earth’s cumulative population had already approached 50 billion, and the number had nearly doubled to 100 billion by 1850. I was surprised by the magnitude. So much for the common notion that as many people are alive today as all who came before us.
    Dividing 250,000 skeletons by 100 billion people you arrive at a few ten-thousandths of 1 percent. That is roughly the sample size on which our knowledge of ancient cancer is based—a sparsely dotted Rorschach you can choose to read two ways.

Chapter 4
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
    On October 9, 1868, a patient identified in a style common to Russian novels and medical