Bad Luck of Cancer – or Misinterpreted Statistics?

Abstract

A paper in Science (January 2015) claimed that the majority, 65% to be precise, of cancers is due to bad luck, so non-preventable. In this paper we show that the analyses, presented in the paper, give absolutely no grounds to make such a claim. Some of the arguments have in the meantime appeared elsewhere, but some have not. We also show that the authors' assumptions and their data can only support a claim of no more than 5% of cancers being random.