World Lung Cancer Expert Diagnosed with Advanced Lung Cancer | Hacker News Reader

World Lung Cancer Expert Diagnosed with Advanced Lung Cancer

news.cuanschutz.edu

39 pointsLittleCat388 comments

> “So somewhere along the 50-odd years of my life, I breathed something in, and it landed on one of my lung cells. That caused a change in the DNA and the genetic material in that cell, and it became a cancer,”

This is the thing that would bother me the most, knowing that in all likelihood there was some innocuous thing I did or didn’t do that had such a huge butterfly effect. You can’t think that way very much or you’ll go crazy; you can’t walk through life trying to dodge invisible particles. Still a mind fuck.

You can reduce the number of rolls you make for cancer in life, but I think at the end of the day you just have to accept that you are still always making some rolls and eventually you are going to lose. Just the fact that we live in an oxygen environment gives us some small level of cancers even if we could otherwise eliminate all other environmental factors and replication errors.

Yes, but still incredibly important to avoid these rolls.

Something that is quite unintuitive is that risk is remarkable fungible - one source of risk is very much like another. Once you properly internalize this you can treat risk literally like radiation. Keep a virtual dosimeter on you and adjust your lifetime exposure accordingly.

There are a couple of consequences for this. First is that you can replace a source of risk with another, to keep below your desired threshold. You start learning to fly, you stop riding motorcycles. Second is that every risk reduction you do is still valuable in itself. You wouldn't start getting monthly CT scans just because you visited Chernobyl - same with risk, wearing your seatbelt is independent of riding motorcycles.

Sounds obvious, but that's the reverse of what most people do. Instead of risk compensation they use certain behaviors as definitions for their risk tolerance. "I already smoke, why should I care about grilling indoors?" This is an incredibly common attitude, and it's the very opposite of what's rational.

This haunts me. I had to evacuate due to the Eaton Fire earlier this year in Pasadena, and afterward had several instances where, despite my best efforts, I definitely breathed in some very bad stuff. I don't think about it much, but in my heart of hearts I feel that this will come back to bite me hard in a couple decades.

“So somewhere along the 50-odd years of my life, I breathed something in, and it landed on one of my lung cells. That caused a change in the DNA and the genetic material in that cell, and it became a cancer,” he says.

Is this real? I know demolition people, carpenters, smokers, people who have survived fires and more, these people are in their 70s and 80s, how does one particle do this?

It's just sheer bad luck that the DNA was damaged in such a way that it causes cancer

Certainly seems like bad luck, people breathe in billions of particles a day...and yet, one particle out of trillions or more somehow did this.

Hopefully CRISPR can help him

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