The new paper in Science showing that two-thirds of all cancers are due to random cell mutations and not due to life-style, environmental conditions or inherited predispositions, is getting a lot of attention today.
Abstract: Some tissue types give rise to human cancers millions of times more often than other tissue types. Although this has been recognized for more than a century, it has never been explained. Here, we show that the lifetime risk of cancers of many different types is strongly correlated (0.81) with the total number of divisions of the normal self-renewing cells maintaining that tissue’s homeostasis. These results suggest that only a third of the variation in cancer risk among tissues is attributable to environmental factors or inherited predispositions. The majority is due to “bad luck,” that is, random mutations arising during DNA replication in normal, noncancerous stem cells. This is important not only for understanding the disease but also for designing strategies to limit the mortality it causes.
Nearly every newspaper headline describes these random cell mutations as being “bad luck”. And that got me to wondering about the nature of “luck” and our perceptions of “luck”.
To be “lucky” an event has to be improbable. The consequences of the lucky event may be good or bad. “Luck” or “fortune” if not qualified by the word “bad” are generally taken to be “good”. Any event which is expected is never classified as being “lucky”. That somebody will win the lottery is highly likely and is not a matter of luck. That one particular person shall win the lottery will always have a very low probability and therefore becomes a lucky happening. All those who didn’t win are not “unlucky” because their loss was expected. But to have the winning ticket which is then carried away in an improbable gust of wind could be considered “unlucky”.
I like to think of luck or fortune as a flowing river. But not everybody is near this river and not all the flow is advantageous. Some of the flow is downright poisonous. The person with “good luck” is then the person who is not only near the river but also has a bucket to capture some of the advantageous flow. The difference between the lucky person and the ordinary person is then access to the river and the existence and the suitability of the “bucket”. I think of a person with “bad luck” as one with an ineffective bucket who picks up some of the “poisoned” or disadvantageous flow. The bucket is both a container and a filter. The Romans praying to the Goddess Fortuna or Hindus praying to Lakshmi are effectively trying to buy their “luck catching buckets”. Sportsmen or gamblers going through superstitious rituals before a match or a play are trying to prepare their “luck buckets”. I used to have a “lucky tie” that I always wore to job interviews. I see athletes and footballers cross themselves before their race or their game but they are only praying for their buckets.
Statistically it may be inevitable that there will be some lottery winner. The intelligent designer of the lottery well knows that he will pay out. But he does not know to whom. And he cannot exercise the control to determine (except in a rigged lottery) the winner. There are – in a simple lottery – two random events to consider:
- the process by which the lottery tickets are distributed, and
- the process by which the number of the winning ticket is selected.
Suppose there are a million tickets numbered one to one million and that one of these numbers will be selected. There is a certainty that a winning ticket will be declared. The operator of the lottery has no need of and no recourse to luck. I have to first acquire a ticket and then my number has to be selected. The odds of my being in the game are somewhat less than one and only then would I have a one-in-a-million chance of winning. My luck-catching bucket does not have to control both these events but it does need to be able to ensure that I get a number and that the particular number allocated to me is also the particular number selected to win.
So the task is to get myself an effective luck-bucket which is not too unwieldy. An instruction manual on how to use it would be helpful But first I need a map showing me where the Luck River flows. But if I don’t have a lottery ticket my luck-bucket won’t help me. So perhaps the first thing to do is to get myself into the right game.
But my buying a lottery ticket is so improbable that this too is a matter of Luck.
There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza,
There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, a hole.
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