ON Wednesday, May 27th, 2009, Neal Wanless, a 23-year-old rancher left his camper van in South Dakota.
He travelled into town to buy livestock feed at the Ampride store. Gathering his bits, he reached into his trouser pocket and bought a dollar Powerball lottery ticket.
The following day he learned that he had won $232m (€224m). It was the largest-ever Powerball lottery prize at that time.
Almost 11,000km away on the other side of the world in China, former construction worker Wang Chengzhou decided to dedicate his life to studying lottery patterns.
It is estimated that he spent up to $1.4m on lottery tickets. He never won the jackpot.
Imagine an upside-down lottery. One where you didn’t ever want your ticket to be picked.
Obviously, the less tickets you have, the less chance yours will be selected.
However, even with just one ticket there’s still a chance – just like Neal Wanless. Cancer is an upside-down lottery.
You’re born – that’s a ticket. Get older and you pick up a few more tickets. Have a family history of cancer, that’s a ticket. Smoke, that’s a bunch of tickets. Get sunburnt, a ticket. Overweight? Another ticket.
Plenty of things can add to your tickets, but it is also possible to dump some of those tickets. The less tickets, the less risk. Exercise, now you’ve less tickets. Stop smoking, lose more tickets. Wear sunscreen, get vaccinated, limit your alcohol intake, have a healthy diet, now those tickets are disappearing.
Yes, we all know have an aunt who smoked every day of her life and never got cancer, but then Wang Chengzhou never won the Chinese lottery, either.
Yes, the numbers of cancers are increasing. It’s hard to read a magazine, listen to the radio, or watch television without being reminded of this. What they don’t remind us of is that our population is growing, and we’re all living longer.
Our great grandparents were born into a world that expected them to live to their 40s. Our grandparents’ world expected them to live until their 50s. Today, most of us can reasonably expect to live until our early to mid-80s. I strongly suspect that our children will be measuring their lives in three figures. A century ago, many people simply didn’t live long enough to get cancer.
Cancer has been with us since life began. In 2020 a team of dinosaur and medical specialists in Canada identified a type of cancer in the shin bone of a plant-eating dinosaur.
This animal weighed about 1.5 tonnes and lived about 76 million years ago. Homo sapiens – us – have only been on the planet for about 300,000 years. That dinosaur with cancer lived 75,700,000 million years before we even appeared.
As part of my job, I am lucky to meet some incredible people. Some have never had cancer but are motivated to reduce their risk in the future. Others have cancer, and once it’s treated, want to lessen their chance of it happening again. For those who do develop cancer, one of the questions I get asked most is ‘what caused it?’. The honest answer is that we generally can’t say. Usually it’s a combination of several different ‘tickets’.
Over the next few articles, we are going to look at cancer. What it is, and more importantly how we can reduce our risk. We are going to look at some of these tickets. The ones that we can’t do much about, and the ones that we can get rid of.
Ultimately about one in two of us will develop cancer. What we don’t hear enough of is that up to 40% of cancers are preventable. Finding it early, fixing it and even living with it are all important. Even more important is reducing our risk of ever getting it in the first place.
Know the facts – own your risk – decide for yourself
