An oncologist's teenage son once remarked that he was not personally worried about cancer, because he believed before he reached an age where cancer became a real threat for him, cancer will be a disease of the past. I will give you that teenagers tend to be idealistic by nature, but I think he is right. Cancer is our present day mysterious elusive killer, a set of diseases that loom larger than our ability to protect life from them. However, to put it in perspective, the thought of anyone dying from a scratch in modern times seems ridiculous. Before penicillin, infection from something as simple as a scratch was a common killer of many people.

On April 7, at the Southwestern and Rocky Mountain Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, University of Kansas and University of Nebraska researchers will present the discovery of a unifying mechanism into how specific metabolites of natural estrogens react with DNA to cause specific damage that begins the series of events leading to breast, prostate and other cancers.

"We have a novel approach to cancer. We know the initiating step," states Dr. Ercole Cavalieri of the University of Nebraska Medial Center's Eppley Cancer Institute. "We think prevention of cancer is a problem we can solve by eliminating this initiating step. Estrogens can induce cancer when natural mechanisms of protection do not work properly in our body, and the estrogen quinones are able to react with DNA. In fact, if these protections are insufficient, due to genetic, lifestyle or environmental influences, then cancer can result." With each new step of the thousand mile journey towards a better understanding of the inner workings of cancer development, we are coming that much closer to effective methods of prevention in making cancer a disease of the past. Good news for the start of Cancer Control Month.