50 Fun Facts About Cancer Awareness

Which animals carry 20 copies of a tumour-suppressor gene that humans have once, explaining Peto's paradox?

African elephants have 20 copies of the gene, Asian elephants 15 to 20, and preserved mammoth DNA shows 14, while humans, manatees and hyraxes carry one.

Which Australian marsupial faces extinction from a contagious facial cancer passed on by biting?

The Tasmanian devil's facial tumour is one of the very few cancers that spreads like an infection, and it is almost universally fatal to the animals it reaches.

The first chemotherapy drugs, tested on lymphoma patients at Yale in 1942, came from which First World War weapon?

Mustard gas destroys fast-dividing blood cells, which is exactly what the Yale team wanted to do to lymphoma when they began secret human trials in December 1942.

Pierre Curie strapped a tube of which element to his arm for ten hours, and the burn suggested a tumour treatment?

Radium was discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in December 1898, and Pierre's self-inflicted burn pointed the way to using it against cancerous tissue.

In 1775 Percivall Pott tied scrotal cancer to soot lodged in the skin of which workers, the first occupational cancer?

Chimney sweeps gave medicine its first proof that an environmental carcinogen causes cancer, and the disease is still called chimney sweeps' carcinoma.

Which year's Surgeon General's report on smoking and lung cancer was released on a Saturday to protect the stock market?

The 1964 report was published on the second Saturday of the year to minimise the hit to American stock markets while maximising coverage in the Sunday papers.

BCG, the century-old tuberculosis vaccine, has been the standard treatment for early cancer of which organ since 1977?

BCG has been the standard of care for non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer since 1977, preventing recurrence in up to two-thirds of superficial cases.

Which Albuquerque chemistry teacher's lung cancer diagnosis, the day after his 50th birthday, opens Breaking Bad?

Walter White is told he has inoperable Stage III lung cancer and will likely die within two years, which drives him to cook methamphetamine for his family's security.

Whose cervical tumour cells, taken without consent in 1951, became the first immortal human cell line?

Henrietta Lacks died months after the biopsy, yet her HeLa cells still reproduce indefinitely in labs worldwide, and her family learned of them only in 1975.

Which former US president announced at 90, in August 2015, that melanoma had reached his brain, then lived to 100?

Jimmy Carter began treatment at once and lived more than nine years beyond the diagnosis, becoming the only US president to reach 100.

Steve Jobs refused surgery for nine months after his 2003 diagnosis of a rare tumour in which organ?

Jobs's islet-cell tumour of the pancreas was the rare treatable kind, and his biographer reports he later regretted trying diets and acupuncture first.

Lance Armstrong was diagnosed at 25 in October 1996, three years before his first Tour de France win, with which cancer?

Armstrong's testicular cancer had already spread when it was found, and after recovering he founded the charity now known as the Livestrong Foundation.

Terry Fox ran 5,373 km across Canada on an artificial leg in 1980 before cancer stopped him; what was the run called?

The Marathon of Hope lasted 143 days and ended when the cancer that had cost Fox a leg spread to his lungs, yet the annual run in his name continues worldwide.

Bob Marley's fatal skin cancer, diagnosed in 1977, began under the nail of which body part?

Marley's right big toe carried acral lentiginous melanoma, a form that hides under nails and on soles, and he refused amputation on religious grounds.

Which aggressive brain tumour was found in John McCain in July 2017 after surgery for a blood clot above his eye?

Glioblastoma also killed Ted Kennedy in 2009 and Beau Biden in 2015, and McCain returned to the Senate less than two weeks after his brain surgery.

Which original Saturday Night Live star, Gene Wilder's wife, died of ovarian cancer in 1989 after misdiagnoses?

Gilda Radner's widower honoured her wish that her illness help others, co-founding the Gilda's Club network of cancer support clubhouses in 1991.

Which Big Brother star's death from cervical cancer in 2009, aged 27, sent young British women rushing for screening?

Jade Goody learned of her diagnosis live on the Indian version of Big Brother, and the screening rush that followed reversed a decade-long decline among women aged 25 to 29.

Which first lady, the first Argentine ever given chemotherapy, died of cervical cancer in 1952 aged 33?

Eva Perón was told she had appendicitis while her doctors hid the real diagnosis, and evidence suggests she was given a lobotomy to ease her final months.

Which cancer of the lung lining, caused by asbestos in over 80% of cases, appears about 40 years after exposure?

Mesothelioma risk extends to families: washing the clothes of someone who worked with asbestos raises the chance of developing it.

Which radioactive gas, seeping from soil into basements, is the top cause of lung cancer among US non-smokers?

Radon is a step in the slow decay chain of uranium in rock, and the EPA rates it second only to cigarettes as a cause of lung cancer overall.

After Chernobyl in 1986, radioactive iodine in milk caused thousands of cancers of which gland in local children?

The thyroid concentrates iodine, and an estimated 95% of the iodine-131 children swallowed came from milk, so the youngest got the highest doses.

Hazel and Augustus, teenagers who fall in love at a cancer support group, lead which 2012 John Green novel?

The Fault in Our Stars takes its title from Cassius's line in Julius Caesar, and Green wrote it after working as a student chaplain in a children's hospital.

Which US president signed the National Cancer Act on 23 December 1971, launching the so-called 'war on cancer'?

Richard Nixon's war on cancer aimed at a cure through research funding, and it was echoed in February 2022 when Joe Biden relaunched his Cancer Moonshot with the goal of halving the cancer death rate within 25 years.

Which colour ribbon, first made as lapel pins in 1997, is the international symbol of childhood cancer awareness?

Gold was chosen because it is a precious metal, a colour meant to reflect the most precious thing in our lives, and it is worn through September's awareness month.

Which colour is the official symbol of ovarian cancer awareness, worn on the first Friday of each September?

Teal is said to stand for strength, hope and unity, and the National Ovarian Cancer Coalition asks supporters to wear it on Wear Teal Day during September's awareness month.

World Cancer Day, run by the Union for International Cancer Control, marks a 2000 Paris charter on which date?

The 4 February date marks the signing of the Charter of Paris against cancer by President Jacques Chirac and UNESCO's director-general at a world summit in 2000.

Macmillan Cancer Support's biggest fundraiser, worth £16.8 million in 2023, asks Britons to host what each September?

The World's Biggest Coffee Morning funds a charity founded in 1911 by Douglas Macmillan after his father died of cancer.

Which spring flower did the UK charity Marie Curie adopt as its emblem in 1986, selling it every March?

The daffodil was picked as a resilient, life-affirming symbol with a joyful yellow, and the Great Daffodil Appeal is now the charity's flagship campaign.

The Pap smear for cervical screening, invented in the 1920s, is named after a physician born in which country?

Georgios Papanikolaou of Greece began the research in 1923, and the test still carries the first syllable of his surname a century later.

Cervical Health Awareness Month, when the US National Cervical Cancer Coalition pushes screening, falls in which month?

January's awareness month focuses on the one common cancer that a vaccine and a routine smear test can almost entirely prevent.

Which German virologist won a 2008 Nobel Prize for proving, against heavy criticism, that HPV causes cervical cancer?

Harald zur Hausen first proposed the link in 1976 and shared the prize with the two French discoverers of HIV.

Which blood marker, unreliable for screening healthy women, is used to track ovarian cancer's response to chemotherapy?

CA-125 is too unreliable to screen healthy women, since it also rises in benign conditions, but it tracks chemotherapy response and relapse in known cases.

World Ovarian Cancer Day, established in 2013 to unite patients worldwide, is marked on which date each year?

The 8 May date gives ovarian cancer a global moment separate from September, which several countries use as their national awareness month.

Which gene, nicknamed the 'guardian of the genome', is inactivated in over half of all human cancers?

TP53's protein halts cell division or orders cell death when DNA is damaged, so losing it lets mutated cells keep multiplying.

Which enzyme, active in about 90% of human tumours, rebuilds chromosome ends so cells can divide indefinitely?

Telomerase lets cancer cells bypass the Hayflick limit that normally caps how many times a cell can divide, which is why they are called immortal.

Imatinib, sold as Gleevec and approved in 2001, transformed which blood cancer by blocking its BCR-ABL protein?

Chronic myeloid leukaemia went from usually fatal to manageable, and Novartis had to be talked into releasing a few grams of the drug for the first 1998 trial.

Denis Burkitt, a surgeon in Uganda, described a childhood jaw tumour whose samples revealed which cancer-causing germ?

Epstein–Barr virus infects most adults harmlessly as the cause of glandular fever, yet it was the first virus ever shown to cause cancer in humans.

Peyton Rous waited until 1966 for a Nobel Prize for showing in 1911 that a tumour could be passed between which animals?

Rous injected cell-free extract of a chicken tumour into healthy Plymouth Rock chickens, and the 55-year gap before his Nobel is among the longest on record.

Barry Marshall drank a beaker of which bacterium to prove it causes gastritis, a microbe now tied to stomach cancer?

Helicobacter pylori made Marshall sick within days and showed up on endoscopy ten days later, and the stunt helped earn him a Nobel Prize.

The hepatitis B vaccine, approved in 1981, has cut cancer of which organ where newborns are routinely immunised?

Liver cancer fell markedly in high-infection countries after newborn vaccination began, making the shot arguably the first vaccine to prevent a cancer.

Which pathologist, the father of modern chemotherapy, got the first remissions in a childhood blood cancer in 1947?

Sidney Farber's 1947 trial of aminopterin put 10 of 16 children into temporary remission from a disease that had been almost inevitably fatal.

Paclitaxel, sold as Taxol and isolated in 1971, came from the bark of which tree, which dies when stripped?

From 1967 to 1993 almost all paclitaxel was stripped from Pacific yew bark, and the ecological row ended only when makers switched to a lab route in the mid-1990s.

Allison and Honjo's 2018 Nobel Prize honoured cancer therapies that release the brakes on which immune cell type?

T cells carry inhibitory checkpoints that tumours exploit, and blocking them unleashes an attack; Allison plays harmonica in a band of immunologists called the Checkpoints.

In 1891 New York surgeon William Coley began shrinking tumours by injecting patients with what?

Coley injected live Streptococcus bacteria after seeing a sarcoma vanish in a patient who caught a skin infection, though the fevers killed two patients.

Which physician of the Roman Empire, alive from about 130 to 200 CE, first used 'onkos' for tumours, naming oncology?

Galen's 'onkos' meant a mass or swelling, and it survives not only in oncology but in the names of cancer-driving oncogenes.

Which German pathologist named leukaemia in 1847 and taught that every cell arises from another cell?

Rudolf Virchow also coined the terms embolism and thrombosis, and his maxim 'omnis cellula e cellula' underpins the idea that cancer begins in a single cell.

The 9–22 chromosome swap behind a blood cancer, first seen in 1960, is named after which US city?

The Philadelphia chromosome was spotted by two University of Pennsylvania cytogeneticists, and its BCR-ABL fusion became the first target of a designer cancer drug.

Alfred Knudson's 1971 'two-hit' hypothesis of inherited cancer was built on a childhood tumour of which organ?

Retinoblastoma of the eye strikes both inherited and sporadic cases, and Knudson's statistics on it led indirectly to the discovery of tumour-suppressor genes.

WHO's cervical cancer elimination strategy sets a '90-70-90' target: 90% of girls vaccinated against HPV by what age?

The age-15 vaccination goal sits beside screening 70% of women by 35 and again by 45, with elimination defined as fewer than 4 cases per 100,000 women.

Which immunologist, 2006 Australian of the Year, created the HPV vaccine's core technology with Jian Zhou in Queensland?

Ian Frazer administered the first official HPV vaccination himself, while Jian Zhou died in 1999 and received the US patent posthumously in 2009.