How does genetics affect things?
Some thing will eventually kill us, be it trauma, acute disease, chronic disease, or simply the eventual non-specific running-down of old age. Given a choice, most of us would probably choose a sudden, painless death in our sleep after an active, alert, old age; not the years of increasing disability most of us seem to face. A surprising finding from the human genome project is that we dont have enough genomes, only 26,000, or so, to actually code for all the diseases. Instead, we inherit a potential for disease. They report that the typical human has between 5 and 50 genetic defects. Some of these errors, mostly in protein coding, enable the potential for diseases that may then be triggered by environmental factors, such as diet or exposure to chemicals. The upshot is that cancer is now believed to be largely caused largely by environmental, rather than inherited factors; a surprising conclusion after a decade of headlines touting the discovery of the “breast cancer gene,” the “colon
