Author: Andrew Sullivan

That’s what a study released last week found:

Bert Vogelstein and Cristian Tomasetti of Johns Hopkins University have put forth a mathematical analysis of the genesis of cancer that suggests many cases are not preventable. Drawing on the published literature, they estimated the number of cells in an organ, what percentage of them are long-lived stem cells, and how many times the stem cells divide. With every division, there’s a risk of a cancer-causing mutation in a daughter cell. Tomasetti and Vogelstein reasoned that the tissues that host the greatest number of stem cell divisions are those most vulnerable to cancer. When Tomasetti crunched the numbers and compared them with actual cancer statistics, he concluded that this theory explained two-thirds of all cancers.

George Dvorsky unpacks the findings:

Take colon cancer, for example, which is far more common than cancer of the duodenum. The researchers found that there are about about 10¹² stem cell divisions in the colon over a lifetime, compared with 10¹⁰ in the duodenum. This would explain why certain tissue types give rise to cancers millions of times more often that other tissue types. As the researchers note in their paper, “[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.”

In all, the researchers found that 65% of cancer incidence can be attributed to random mutations in genes that drive cancer growth.

But Annalisa Merelli doesn’t want us to think of cancer as simply about luck:

Notably, some types of tissues associated with cancer that are often linked to lifestyle habits—skin and lung, for instance—did show an increase in mutation as a consequence of environmental factors (essentially confirming that quitting smoking and avoiding excessive sun exposure are very good ideas). Further, the study didn’t include two of the most common cancers, breast and prostate. Tomasetti himself had this to say:

“I’m not claiming any cancers, overall across the population, are the result of pure chance,” Tomasetti told the BBC. “But what I am claiming is there are some tissues—for example blood cancer—where there is very little evidence of any hereditary or environmental factor.”

Tara Culp-Ressler adds more context:

“If two-thirds of cancer incidence across tissues is explained by random DNA mutations that occur when stem cells divide, then changing our lifestyle and habits will be a huge help in preventing certain cancers, but this may not be as effective for a variety of others,” Cristian Tomasetti, an assistant professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins and one of the co-authors of the study, told BBC News. “We should focus more resources on finding ways to detect such cancers at early, curable stages.”

As Tomasetti alludes to, the findings don’t mean that doctors should stop encouraging lifestyle changes that can help lower Americans’ risk of developing cancer. Certainly, some cancers are greatly influenced by individual choices.

Kleiman wants to “move ahead with genuinely medical cannabis products, and stop using ‘medicating’ as a euphemism for getting wasted”:

If I have an infection and go to my internist, she does not say to me, “You have an infection. I have heard reports that antibiotics can treat infections. I recommend that you take some antibiotics.” No, she writes me a prescription for (say) 100 mg. of amoxicillin, three times a day, with meals, for seven days. “Blow some weed” is not a prescription. That’s the reason that “rescheduling” cannabis to recognize its medical value is a non-starter legally; rescheduling needs to follow clinical research, and would apply only to specific products, not to the plant generically. …

People who really want to make cannabis medicines ought to be arguing for freeing clinical research from its bureaucratic chains, not pretending that taking an unknown amount of an unknown mix of chemicals is the same thing as taking a pharmaceutical drug. And as states move to legalize the sale of cannabis without a medical recommendation, the justification for having a parallel “medical marijuana” supply system disappears. Unfortunately, the people making money from running that system will fight to the bitter end against any threat to their business, and do so in the name of “protecting patients.” Those battles are already being fought in Colorado and Washington.

Now that “medical marijuana” has served – as the advocates intended – to legitimize non-medical legalization, perhaps it’s time to drop the mask and have that debate on its own merits.

Michael Shermer unpacks our fascination:

Zombies, for one thing, fit into the horror genre in which monstrous creatures—like dangerous predators in our ancestral environment—trigger physiological fight-or-flight reactions such as an increase in heart rate and blood pressure and the release of such stress hormones as cortisol and adrenaline that help us prepare for danger. New environments may contain an element of risk, but we must explore them to find new sources of food and mates. So danger contains an element of both fear and excitement.

We also have a fascination with liminal beings that fall in between categories, writes philosopher Stephen T. Asma in his 2009 book On Monsters (Oxford University Press).

The fictional Frankenstein monster, like most zombies, is a being in between animate and inanimate, human and nonhuman. Hermaphrodites fall between male and female, and hybrid animals fall between species. Our innate templates for categorizing objects and beings are modified through experience, and when we encounter something or someone new, we check for category matches. Moderate deviation from the known category generates attention (friend or foe?), Asma says, but a “cognitive mismatch” elicits both dread and fascination. Add the emotion of disgust triggered by slime, drool, snot, blood, feces and rotting flesh, and we may find ourselves both repelled and drawn to such liminal creatures.

Previous Dish on the “uncanny valley” here. And further proof that our fascination with zombies endures: Walking Dead was the most tweeted show of 2014.

(Photo: Tor Johnson as a zombie in the 1959 cult movie Plan 9 from Outer Space, via Wikimedia Commons)

This is big news for the 2016 race. But Huckabee is gonna need to raise some serious cash:

“You’re going to need $150 million to win the nomination, and probably $75 million to get you through Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina,” Ed Rollins, a former Huckabee adviser, said in an interview. “That means 200 to 300 fundraising events and a vast, focused apparatus. Mike didn’t have that last time, and he still has to prove he can develop one.”

Aaron Blake, who posts the above chart, focuses on Huckabee’s Evangelical support in 2008:

In all but eight of these states, Huckabee’s showing was within single digits of the evangelical population — or better. Now, does that mean Huckabee has a chance to win or will carry these states in 2016? Not necessarily. His devoted base is both a ticket to the dance and the reason he’ll struggle to win the nomination. There quite simply aren’t enough evangelicals out there. In fact, there is no state outside the South and the lower Midwest that is more than one-quarter evangelical.

Weigel also eyes the Evangelical vote:

In current polls, Huckabee earns roughly three times as much Iowa Republican support as Santorum. In conversations Saturday night, even strategists who planned to work for other candidates called Huckabee the Iowa frontrunner.

They also argued that he was weaker than he’d been in 2008. The likely 2016 field would be more competitive than 2008’s, when Huckabee only had to get past the somnolent Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney, who spent heavily in Iowa but struggled to win over voters skeptical of his Mormonism and past pro-choice views.

Paul Mirengoff takes Huck seriously:

In my opinion, none of the candidates most widely discussed as a possible GOP standard bearer has demonstrated people-to-people political skills that match Huckabee’s. And his popularity among among evangelical voters, which probably has grown since 2008, is enough to make him seem formidable.

Huckabee would become the instant favorite in Iowa, where he won the caucus in 2008. And as the Iowa caucus winner, Huckabee would automatically become a first-tier candidate. If he could then win in South Carolina, not an impossibility, he might become the front-runner.

James Antle III considers how he’ll impacts the rest of the field:

Perhaps Huckabee can top his 2008 showing. If Jeb Bush runs but Chris Christie proves more durable than Giuliani, Huckabee may be positioned to win more states with 25 to 30 percent of the vote. That probably wouldn’t suffice for the nomination by itself, but it could buy him more time to broaden his base.

The likelier scenario is that if Huckabee is once again the evangelical candidate, he will prevent other conservatives with non-evangelical appeal—and probably more money and better organizations—from gaining steam.

Which is why Peter Spiliakos thinks Huckabee has “a target on his back”:

I don’t see any path for a Republican populist that does not include a very large share of the conservative evangelical vote. If Huckabee dominates among conservative evangelicals, there is no room for a Ted Cruz or a Rick Santorum and much less room for Rand Paul to improve on his father’s 2012 performance. In order for these alternative candidates to have a chance, they would have to break apart Huckabee as a viable candidate (Rand Paul has already started). If they can’t do that, they don’t have anything. Those are the incentives

Larison is puzzled by the run:

Huckabee is vaguely populist on economics in affect if not on policy, and that causes pro-corporate Republicans to break out in hives. He openly dislikes libertarians, and the feeling is mutual. Though he does his best to take hard-line positions on most foreign policy issues, he doesn’t offer the hard-liners anything they can’t already get from someone else, and he has no foreign policy experience worth mentioning. As an evangelical and former preacher, Huckabee also clashes culturally with much of the party’s donor and pundit class. Last time, many movement conservatives could barely conceal their contempt for Huckabee’s background, and I imagine this time around there will be no attempt to conceal it. Huckabee is in for a bruising, and unrewarding presidential campaign. It makes no sense why he would want to do this.

And Rich Lowry sees this as potentially good news for Jeb:

We’ll see if the Republican field lines up as you would conventionally expect it to, with Jeb dominating the establishment slot. If it does, the early handicapping has to be that every candidate who gets in on the right, fracturing that part of the field, marginally helps the former Florida governor.

David Carpenter, who recently published a new translation of the Magna Carta, reflects on its 800th anniversary:

In 1215 Magna Carta was an elitist document, yet by the end of the 13th century it had become known across society, and all sections of society, legitimately or not, were laying claim to its benefits. … Already in 1215 itself the Charter had been translated from Latin into French, the vernacular language of the nobility. By the end of the 13th century the Charter was being proclaimed in English, the language of everyone else.

In around 1300, the peasants of Bocking in Essex … appealed to Magna Carta in a struggle against their lord’s bailiff. In the 1350s, legislation defined the “no free man” as “no man of whatever condition”. The Charter seemed increasingly to have a universal application. It had established the base from which it would go around the world. Its appeal lay not in its precise details, but in its assertion of the rule of law. Everything is of its own time, but only some ideas are taken up and spread. When human rights are still trampled on in many parts of the world, what happened in a meadow by the Thames 800 years ago retains its significance. Let us hope Magna Carta will still be celebrated 100 years from now.

Nick Higham also pays tribute to the document:

As to all the modern-day brouhaha around the anniversary – that rests particularly on another principle bequeathed by the charter to subsequent generations, a principle fundamental to British law and the law of many other nations, including the United States.

Magna Carta’s most famous clauses forbid the king to sell, deny or delay justice, and protect any free man from arbitrary imprisonment “save by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land”.

“Free men” in 1215 accounted for less than half the population – the rest were serfs, to whom the charter did not apply. And “men” meant men – women, except for widows, merit barely a mention in Magna Carta. But the principle was established. The law could serve as a bulwark against tyranny. And once established, it has never been revoked.

(Image of Magna carta cum statutis angliae (Great Charter with English Statutes), early 14th-century, via Wikimedia Commons)

Jeanne Marie Laskas profiles the former astronaut Buzz Aldrin, including details about the depression and difficulties he struggled with after his historic journey:

After the moon, Buzz cracked up. There was nothing left to do. The media frenzy was worldwide; twenty-four countries in forty-five days—and that was just the beginning. NASA clearly had no further use for him in space; now he was just supposed to be some kind of NASA PR flack.

He resigned from NASA in 1971 and returned to the Air Force. It didn’t seem like the Air Force knew what to do with someone who had been to the moon. He was an outsider, the egghead from academia who’d just tumbled off the speakers’ circuit. He drank a lot. His marriage to the mother of his three children fell apart, and he retired from the Air Force. He went to rehab. He got married again, but that lasted a year. He drank a lot more, fell in love a lot more. His Air Force pension wasn’t much. That was when he started at the Cadillac dealership. He sucked at selling cars. Rehab was the first time he ever really talked about feelings. It turned out he had so many feelings. An emptiness so deep. He discovered the melancholy of all things done.

He was in his forties, a conqueror with nothing left to conquer but his own demons. The second man to walk on the moon. Number two.

His father never accepted the fact that Buzz was not number one. Grasping, his father waged an unsuccessful one-man campaign to get the U.S. Postal Service to change its Neil Armstrong “First Man on the Moon” commemorative stamp to one that said “First Men on the Moon” so it could include Buzz. As for Buzz’s mental breakdown, his depression and alcoholism, his father never accepted that, either. Or if he did, he blamed the moon, the absence of gravity, the unknown physical properties of space. The moon must have ruined Buzz.

(Image of Aldrin’s photograph of his own bootprint on the moon via NASA)

Win Bassett, a seminarian at Yale Divinity School, looks back at what he learned as a hospital chaplain this past summer. Avoiding phrases like “everything happens for a reason” is among the lessons that mattered the most:

Instead of trafficking in speculations about why a person experiences pain or becomes ill, I found it far more helpful to ask the question “What now?”

Reynolds Price wrote that after his cancer diagnosis “the kindest thing anyone could have done for me…would have been to look me square in the eye and say this clearly, ‘Reynolds Price is dead. Who will you be now?’” I once presented this passage from Price at a conference, and a participant who had survived breast cancer told me that, years ago, she playfully added “2.0” at the end of her name.

Nevertheless, I bet she sometimes heard the wrong words at the wrong times during her recovery. We’ve all said them, and we don’t do it because we fail to understand that these responses are theologically indefensible. We utter these words because they seem to be the only things that might give momentary comfort. Because these dubious phrases have become our default expression of consolation, we need God’s help to put them aside, to remain silent until we have something truer and therefore more helpful to say. Sometimes the words never come, and silence itself is enough. With or without words, chaplains are there to offer another loving presence, sometimes the only loving presence. As the Episcopal priest and poet Spencer Reece writes in a poem about his own experience in a hospital chaplaincy, “It is correct to love even at the wrong time.”