Some are market driven (speculative investments based on likely returns), some are politically driven (breast cancer funding research vs. prostate cancer).

Sadly, we tend to spend a lot of money and research into areas that by default, are primarily problems in the west.

Dengue fever and malaria ain’t gonna win votes or investor dollars. If we can work out a way to get a vote or make a buck out of third world diseases then the improvements and solutions to these diseases would be quantum.

I think your fears are understandable but will not necessarily play out.

My fears are essentially that the belief in the profit potential of genetic solutions will lead to an underinvestment in research into other ontogenic factors.

We are, I think, in agreement that genetic “solutions” to cancer, while useful, are not likely to be a magic bullet for cancers and thus the profit potential is limited. I wish I had your confidence that the result would therefore be a more rational ratio of investment in a variety of potential solution areas.

Unfortunately, genetic technology is perceived as Teh Market Sexy, so is likely to continue to receive disproportionate funding.

I suspect that the greater funding for genetic factors research has a lot to do with the potential for profits from medical fixes and the concomitant prestige.

I would hazard a guess, based on the experience of companies who have tried to commercialise genetic markers in the livestock industry, that potential profits will be very hard to come by. The beef and sheep industries have both had simplistic genetic markers for things like muscle development identified (all too hastily) that did not express reliably enough in offspring to make investment in the genetics worthwhile. Mammals are astonishingly complex creatures and gene expression is not a simple matter - you can have a genetic marker but never express it based on environmental exposure. We just don’t know enough about the mechanisms that lead to expression.

In short tigtog, I think your fears are understandable but will not necessarily play out.

Those guys in India, China etc are walking chimneys. It’s almost complulsory for men in many of these places. It’s bloody hard to quit in China when your average pack of darbs is setting you back about a dollar fifty.

As for women, maybe the reverse is true. I sense in China the girls who do smoke are picking it up to maybe emulate women in the west. They may see it as a sign of being liberated.

In the west, generally speaking - the richer you are the less likely you are to smoke.

As any pathologist will tell you if you ask, breast cancers seen on mammography or ultrasound are not “early detection”. That’s just PR.

We simply do not know whether the cancer has metastasised or whether it may never.

Not plastic, Flo, think of the petrochemicals involved there! maybe a glass bubble (and tread very, very carefully.)

As for removing one’s breasts, some people have done that very thing. It would surely beat living with a sword of damocles over you every day - unlike some cancers, the BRCA gene does seem consistently lethal.

Environmental factors research isn’t going to be funded in the same way, because identifying oncogenic factors that can’t be fixed without retooling our social infrastructure just isn’t going to make money for people in the same way.

On a tangent, check out a story from the US that reflects a corporate bottom line trumps public safety mentality:

WASHINGTON: The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease.

The Agriculture Department tests fewer than 1 percent of slaughtered cows for the disease, which can be fatal to humans who eat tainted
beef. A beef producer in the western state of Kansas, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, wants to test all of its cows.

Larger meat companies feared that move because, if Creekstone should test its meat and advertised it as safe, they might have to perform
the expensive tests on their larger herds as well.

The Agriculture Department regulates the test and argued that widespread testing could lead to a false positive that would harm the
meat industry. . . .

And if a genetic predisposition to breast cancer is established? What then? Hack off the breasts and gobble drugs that may give women higher susceptability to other forms of cancer and, even more likely, other serious diseases and debilitating side effects

The drug companies sure do have many mindless ones marching in tune. Yanks are the worst.

Environmental carcinogens exist in equally as much, if not more so, in aspects of less modern societies. For example, cooking fires. People in these societies don’t tend to live long enough to get cancer.

Also, as the papilloma virus demonstrates, cancer is also caused by infectious diseases. Modern society has done a very good job in reducing the prevalence of infectious diseases (though, unfortunately, disproportionately in the first world).

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, cancer is a disease of the genome (and epigenome). Even if an external carcinogen is involved, the genotype of the organism involved plays a very important role in whether cancer develops or not. Hence, some people can smoke their entire lives and not get lung cancer and some people get lung cancer from simply breathing urban pollution. Accordingly, techniques that identify areas of the genome or epigenome that demonstrate a susceptibility to a particular carcinogen allow the person involved to take proactive steps to reduce their exposure. Safe limits of any particular carcinogen will vary greater between individuals, and that basis will be genetic and, to a lesser extent, epigenetic (DNA methylation, a major part of the epigenome, is mostly reset between generations in mammals).

I would have thought that such effects, if they exist, would be readily detectable if you ran enough statistics on it.

(2) Epigenetic considerations, such as whether the gene came from a father or mother or whether conception was in a test tube or naturally.

(3) it is made trickier by what Jim Watson (of Watson and Crick) says is the most important revolution for genetics in the next decades: the impact of the folding of the chromosomes into complex structures, with genes on the outside transcribed often, and those tucked away deep in clefts rarely transcribed. We know almost nothing about this folding other than that it is important.

That said, I’m in favor of testing providing it comes with counselling and privacy issues (e.g. insurance costs) are controlled.

Of course, part of the drive comes from all the patenting of sequences of unknown function, the finding of a correlation, and the ability to market a test for that sequence. $$$$

If I was in Frankenstein mode, and your DNA damage comments are spot on, I’d mention that the generic DNA recognition-and-repair systems could be ratcheted up a notch or two by playing with promotor regions: but that would involve genetically engineered humans.