In January, two researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, (and the journalists who wrote about them) spurred a firestorm by writing in Science that much of cancer is due to “bad luck,” or random mistakes that take place when cells divide. That paper launched a lively debate, and today a group at the State University of New York at Stony Brook has fired back: The authors argue in Nature that the earlier analysis was flawed, and cancers are due to this “bad luck” only 10% to 30% of the time, STAT reports. The Stony Brook researchers say that, instead, external causes such as environmental risks overwhelmingly drive disease.

Publicação retirada da Science.org