World Science Scholars

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    • Why is identifying possible environmental causes of cancer such a challenging and controversial line of inquiry?

    • identifying possible environmental causes of cancer is a very challenging and controversial line of inquiry because it is well known that there are things that affect our body, however is hard to document that things such as food or contaminated water, even-though they won’t make you healthier, will specifically increase the chances that you develop cancer.

    • Our bodies have or been mutate by our prior ancestors thru the genetic DNA of our blood line but is possible that we inherit the mutate gene or been aggravate by the pollution of the of the modern civilize world.

    • Some pollutants could add to damage caused by other environmental factors. However, not everyone would be as likely to develop cancer from that set of environmental factors. Because there could be many combinations of environmental and genetic factors, enumerating all sets is impossible. We will end up tracking the most common sets of factors first, only tracking other sets once the common sets are known and have treatments. We can’t catch them all unfortunately.

    • identifying possible environmental causes of cancer is a challenging and controversial line of inquiry because one does not know what things are harmful and can cause mutation. yes one should be careful but how much careful is very careful, restricting your needs or wants is not the solution. Environmental causes could include pollutants or polluted water, since both of them pose such a risk what is one supposed to do the pandemic did make us wear masks but what about the things that we have no control over, we trust the water provided to us by the water purifiers but none can be sure about the risk it still might pose.

    • It’s challenging and controversial because of the limitations of causation. We can often times prove correlation between environmental factors and cancer. Like discovering a cancer cluster in a population of people that live next to some kind of industrial plant. It may seem obvious that the cancer in this group of people is being caused by ground contaminants from the industrial plant these people live next to. But just because you can prove correlation dos not mean you can prove causation. The biological links between cancer manifestation and contaminants is still poorly understood and when trying to prove culpability this correlation versus causation argument gets very complicated.

    • Hello Ladies and Gentlemen,

      Controversy is in the control. Unwillingness of industry to compensate for illness, and tech levels where we cannot escape toxins.

      Former Gov. Of California- Arnold- wants to have a 0% pollution tech level.

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    • Even controlling environmental factors wouldn’t change the chance mistake in DNA replication. Legislation regarding the rights of non-smokers in public spaces has been a big help in decreasing cancer levels, though. Further restrictions on air pollution would help as well. Industry does like to put up a fight and demand additional proof of the harms of pollution.

    • Identifying environmental cancer-causes is hard & controversial because of 2 main reasons. The first is that, while there are many environmental factors that are known to be unhealthy, it is hard to document whether they specifically cause cancer or not. The second reason is that there are so many environmental factors that people suspect. Combine that with the fact that everyone’s genes respond differently to those factors, and we conclude that it’s impossible to chart every single environmental factor. So we simply focus on the leading & most-affecting environmental cancer-causes in order to treat the majority of people first.

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