Can cancer be inherited or is it a herd feature?
Cancer cannot be inherited i.e. cannot it be passed from one generation to another. Willis the famous bio-pathologist had generalized that most of the cancer families exemplify only the laws of chance (Pathology of Tumors, Butterworths, London, 1967). Scheinfeld commented way back in 1939 on the problem – Thus, in grandmother, mother and daughter, where all have breast cancers, each of their cancers may be entirely unrelated to the others … The breast cancers in the three generations of women might be no more related than three cases of stomach trouble, one resulting from over-eating, another from drinking bad liquor, and the third due to stomach ulcers. Researchers from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden studied more than 44,000 pairs of identical twins from Denmark, Finland and Sweden. Generally, if one of the pair developed cancer, the odds of the other twin developing the same cancer were less than 15 per cent. Let us move on to some facts: American Cancer Society also observed t
