99 Fun Facts About Cancer Awareness

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

Elephants' cells self-destruct far more readily than ours when their DNA is damaged, which may be why an animal so huge and long-lived rarely dies of cancer.

Which Australian marsupial became endangered through a contagious facial cancer passed on by biting?

Tasmanian devil tumour cells pass from animal to animal as living grafts, hiding from the new host's defences so that it rarely rejects them; most devils die within months of the first lumps.

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

Mustard gas left soldiers short of white blood cells, so Yale pharmacologists tried a chemical cousin on a man with advanced lymphoma; his tumours melted away, though only for a few weeks.

Pierre Curie kept a sample of which element against his arm for ten hours, and the burn suggested a tumour treatment?

Radium burned Curie's skin so badly that the wound took months to heal, and in 1901 a French dermatologist began treating patients' skin lesions with borrowed radium.

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

Chimney sweeps' apprentices were boys small enough for narrow flues, who often climbed them naked and caked in soot; in 1788 Parliament barred sweeps from taking on any boy under eight.

Which US official's 1964 report tying smoking to lung cancer came out on a Saturday to spare the stock market?

Surgeon General Luther Terry chose a Saturday so the news would also fill the Sunday papers; the next year Congress ordered a health warning onto every cigarette pack.

BCG, the century-old tuberculosis vaccine, is placed directly inside which organ to treat early cancer there?

Bladder cancer has been treated this way since the 1970s: the live vaccine is run in through a catheter and held for two hours, rousing defensive cells in the lining that seem to kill cancer cells too.

Which Breaking Bad character is diagnosed with lung cancer the day after turning 50, setting the plot in motion?

Walter White, a chemistry teacher told he has inoperable lung cancer and at best two years to live, starts cooking methamphetamine to leave his family money.

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 the 1970s.

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

Jimmy Carter was given a new antibody drug approved only the year before, and within four months said a brain scan showed no sign of the tumours; he lived another nine years.

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, later stripped of seven Tour de France titles, was diagnosed at 25 in October 1996 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.

Under the nail of which toe or finger did Bob Marley's fatal skin cancer, diagnosed in 1977, begin?

Big toe: the dark spot was first taken for a football injury, but it was acral lentiginous melanoma, which hides under nails and on soles, and Marley refused to have the toe amputated.

Which aggressive brain tumour was found in John McCain in July 2017 after surgery to remove a blood clot?

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 helped found Gilda's Club, cancer support clubhouses named for her line that the disease gave her 'membership in an elite club I'd rather not belong to'.

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

Jade Goody was told she had cancer while a contestant on India's version of Big Brother, and the surge in smear tests, dubbed the Jade Goody effect, made ministers review the screening age.

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

Eva Perón was told her first operation was for appendicitis and her cancer was kept from her; a Yale neurosurgeon who studied her skull X-rays argues she was also lobotomised, which others dispute.

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

Radon is radioactive, a step in the slow decay 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 soaks up iodine, and children, with small glands and milk-heavy diets, took the largest doses; more than 6,000 thyroid cancers had been diagnosed among them by 2005.

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 had already announced, two months before signing, that shuttered germ-warfare laboratories at the Army's Fort Detrick would be turned into a cancer research centre.

Which colour ribbon 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 campaigns stress symptoms such as persistent bloating because, unlike cervical cancer, ovarian cancer has no reliable test for women who feel well.

World Cancer Day marks a charter signed in 2000 by UNESCO's chief and the host nation's president in which city?

Paris hosted the World Summit Against Cancer, where Jacques Chirac and UNESCO's director-general signed a charter whose own text made the signing date, 4 February, World Cancer Day.

Macmillan Cancer Support's biggest fundraising event asks Britons to host what each September?

A coffee morning was the simple idea in 1990: guests gave the price of their cup to Macmillan, the charity Douglas Macmillan founded in 1911 after his father died of cancer.

Which spring flower has the UK charity Marie Curie used in its fundraising appeal every March since 1986?

Daffodils were handed out fresh at the first appeal, held in Scotland; today the Great Daffodil Appeal offers pins instead, and the flower sits in the charity's logo.

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

Greece-born Georgios Papanikolaou first reported the method in 1928 to little notice, and it caught on only in the 1940s; his wife Mary was his lab technician and one of his test subjects.

Which cosmetics company handed out pink ribbons at its counters in 1992, helping make them breast cancer's best-known symbol?

Estée Lauder's Evelyn Lauder and Self magazine first asked activist Charlotte Haley to share her peach ribbon; she refused them as too commercial, so they switched the colour to pink.

Which virologist won a 2008 Nobel Prize for proving, against the prevailing view, that HPV causes cervical cancer?

Harald zur Hausen proposed the link in the 1970s against the dogma of the day; proof came in 1983, when he found HPV 16 in cervical tumours, and it opened the way to a vaccine.

Which actress's 2013 essay 'My Medical Choice', on her preventive double mastectomy, sent demand for BRCA gene tests soaring?

Angelina Jolie wrote that she carried a faulty BRCA1 gene and had lost her mother to cancer; UK clinics saw family-history referrals more than double in the two months that followed.

Which annual men's health campaign began among 30 friends in Melbourne, Australia?

Movember's 30 founders and friends set out to bring the moustache back into fashion; a year later nearly 500 growers gave Australia's prostate cancer charity the largest donation it had ever received.

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 melted away in most early-stage patients in the first trial, in 1998, and people who stay in remission on the daily pill can now expect a normal lifespan.

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

Epstein–Barr virus, the usual cause of glandular fever, infects more than nine in ten people by adulthood, mostly without harm, yet it was the first virus 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?

Chickens injected with a filtered, cell-free extract of one hen's tumour grew the same cancer, evidence that a virus could cause it; the Nobel came 55 years later, when Rous was 87.

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

Helicobacter pylori made Marshall ill within days, and a biopsy soon found it thriving in his inflamed stomach; he and Robin Warren shared the 2005 Nobel Prize for the discovery.

Which vaccine, licensed in 1981 and given to newborns, has cut rates of liver cancer in countries such as Taiwan?

Hepatitis B vaccine has gone to newborns across Taiwan since a national programme began in 1984, and liver cancer among the island's children then fell, because the vaccine heads off the lifelong infection that can cause it.

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

Sidney Farber's drug put 10 of 16 children with leukaemia into temporary remission; a year later a radio broadcast from the bedside of a young patient called 'Jimmy' launched the Jimmy Fund he set up.

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

Pacific yew bark was for decades almost the only supply of the drug, raising fears for the tree; the supply problem eased when chemists built it from extracts of cultivated yews of other species.

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.

Which physician of the Roman Empire used the Greek word 'onkos', the root of 'oncology', for tumours of every kind?

Galen's 'onkos' meant a mass or swelling; he kept Hippocrates' older word 'karkinos', the crab, for the malignant kind, which Latin writers turned into 'cancer'.

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

Rudolf Virchow also named embolism and thrombosis, and the maxim he popularised, 'omnis cellula e cellula', underpins the idea that a cancer grows from a single errant 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 researchers working in that city, and the fused BCR-ABL gene it creates later became the target of one of the earliest designer cancer drugs.

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.

Which first lady's public account of a 1974 mastectomy prompted a surge of American women to check for breast cancer?

Betty Ford's candour was followed three weeks later by the vice-president's wife, Happy Rockefeller, revealing a lump of her own; so many women then examined themselves that diagnoses jumped, the 'Betty Ford blip'.

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

Ian Frazer gave the first official HPV vaccination himself; his research partner Jian Zhou never saw it, having died in 1999 at the age of 42.

Hippocrates named cancer after which animal, whose legs the swollen veins around a tumour resembled?

Crab is 'karkinos' in Greek, the word Hippocrates used for tumours; the Roman writer Celsus later translated it into Latin as 'cancer', which means the same animal.

Cartilage pills from which fish were sold as a cancer cure after a 1992 book, with no evidence?

Sharks do get cancer: the first malignant tumour in one was recorded in 1908, and no evidence shows that their cartilage treats or prevents the disease.

Crippling bone cancer was diagnosed in a fossil leg bone, dug up in Canada in 1989, of which animal?

A horned dinosaur called Centrosaurus, found in Alberta, had osteosarcoma in its fibula; the severe limp would have left it more exposed to predators.

Which actress wrote in The New York Times in 2013 about choosing a preventive double mastectomy?

Angelina Jolie carried a faulty BRCA1 gene that gave her an estimated 87% risk of breast cancer; the operation cut that to under five percent.

Which fundraiser for men's cancers, named with Australian slang and a month, asks for a moustache?

Movember joins 'mo', Australian slang for a moustache, to November, and its supporters spend those thirty days growing one for men's health causes.

Charlotte Haley's peach breast cancer ribbons were eclipsed in 1992 by ribbons of which colour?

Pink ribbons went out in Estée Lauder's New York stores alongside Self magazine's 1992 awareness issue, a year after every runner in a New York breast cancer race had been given one.

Which US president had a tumour secretly cut from his mouth aboard a yacht during the Panic of 1893?

Grover Cleveland feared the news would deepen the depression, so surgeons worked through his mouth to leave no scar as the yacht Oneida sailed off Long Island.

Sadako Sasaki, a Hiroshima girl dying of leukaemia, folded a thousand paper models of which bird?

Crane folding follows a Japanese legend that making a thousand earns a wish; a statue of Sadako holding one stands in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park.

Which Marvel antihero gains his healing powers from an experimental treatment for his terminal cancer?

Deadpool is the mercenary Wade Wilson; the treatment counteracts his cancer but leaves him so scarred that he hides from his girlfriend, Vanessa.

Which 1970s television favourite died of cancer on the same day in June 2009 as Michael Jackson?

Farrah Fawcett, famous from Charlie's Angels, died a few hours before Jackson, and news of her death was largely overshadowed by coverage of his.

Which English singer released Blackstar on his 69th birthday, two days before dying of cancer?

David Bowie had kept his illness private since 2014 and recorded Blackstar in secret in New York; critics came to read the album as a farewell to his fans.

Which film studio founder, a heavy smoker all his life, died of lung cancer in 1966?

Walt Disney died before either his Florida theme park or EPCOT, the city of tomorrow he had planned beside it, could be completed.

Which Black Panther star kept his colon cancer private for four years, until his death in 2020?

Chadwick Boseman was diagnosed in 2016, the same year he first appeared as the Marvel hero T'Challa, and kept working without telling the public.

Which Viennese thinker, a devoted cigar smoker, needed a jaw prosthesis after cancer operations?

Sigmund Freud took up tobacco at 24 and blamed the habit himself for the growth found in 1923; the prosthesis left his speech seriously impaired.

Which US president wrote his memoirs while dying of throat cancer, with Mark Twain as publisher?

Ulysses S. Grant wrote to rescue his family after a Ponzi scheme bankrupted him, and Twain sent thousands of agents door to door to sell the two volumes.

A US cancer 'moonshot' funded in 2016 was named after Beau, the late son of which vice president?

Joe Biden's son Beau had died of brain cancer in 2015; the 21st Century Cures Act set aside $1.8 billion for the research drive that carries his name.

Which first lady spoke openly about her mastectomy weeks after her husband took office in 1974?

Betty Ford's candour sent so many American women to examine themselves that reported breast cancer cases rose, a spike nicknamed the 'Betty Ford blip'.

Which 2007 film casts Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman as terminal cancer patients on a road trip?

The Bucket List got a one-star review from the critic Roger Ebert, himself a cancer patient, who objected to how lightly it treated the disease.

The wristbands Nike developed in 2004 for Lance Armstrong's cancer foundation were which colour?

Yellow was a nod to the jersey worn by the overall leader of the Tour de France, and some 80 million of the bands had been sold by 2013.

Whose 1821 autopsy on a remote Atlantic island, attended by British doctors, found stomach cancer?

Napoleon Bonaparte's father had died of the same disease, and a 2021 review by an international team of gastrointestinal pathologists backed the original verdict.

Which Oscar-winning actor's anti-smoking message aired days after his 1985 death from lung cancer?

Yul Brynner, a heavy smoker from the age of 12, made the announcement with the American Cancer Society out of a television interview given when he knew he was dying.

Which film star and UNICEF ambassador died of a rare appendix cancer months after visiting Somalia?

Audrey Hepburn fell ill on returning from the 1992 mission, and surgeons in Los Angeles found a tumour that had been growing slowly for several years.

Which New York Yankee, dying of cancer in the late 1940s, was among the first to get drugs with radiation?

Babe Ruth's fame won him access to experimental treatments, including Teropterin, a folic acid derivative that he was possibly the first human to receive.

Which Today show host had a colonoscopy on air in 2000, after colon cancer killed her husband?

Katie Couric's broadcast was followed by a measurable rise in colonoscopies across the United States, a bump that became known as the 'Couric effect'.

Which food did the WHO's cancer agency put in its top-risk group in 2015, alongside tobacco smoke?

Processed meat such as bacon, ham and salami sits in Group 1 because the agency found sufficient evidence that eating it causes colorectal cancer.

Which country was the first in the world, in 2004, to ban smoking in every workplace, pubs included?

Ireland's ban began on 29 March 2004 and covers restaurants and public transport as well as bars; second-hand smoke is itself a proven cause of lung cancer.

The earliest known descriptions of cancer, written around 1600 BC, come from which ancient land?

Egypt's Edwin Smith Papyrus describes breast tumours and a way to cauterise them, while stating flatly that the disease has no treatment.

The PSA blood test, approved by the FDA for men of 50 and over, screens for cancer of which gland?

Prostate readings can also rise with harmless enlargement or inflammation, which is one reason doctors still argue about whether routine screening does more good than harm.

Which burrowing East African rodent, able to live beyond 37 years, is highly resistant to cancer?

Naked mole-rat cells make a giant form of the sugar hyaluronan, over five times larger than the human version, which seems to stop tumours from forming.

Which radiation, discovered by Wilhelm Röntgen in 1895, was being used on tumours within a year?

X-rays were aimed at cancer in 1896 by Emil Grubbe of Chicago, who was possibly the first American physician to try the idea.

A contagious cancer that arose thousands of years ago still spreads between which animals?

Dogs pass the tumour on through mating, licking and sniffing, and its genome shows that every case descends from the cells of a single long-dead animal.

Which drug, pulled from European pharmacies in 1961 for causing birth defects, now treats myeloma?

Thalidomide was first sold in West Germany in 1957 for anxiety, sleeplessness and nausea in pregnancy; today it is a first-line myeloma treatment, given with a steroid.

In the ABCDE checklist for spotting melanoma in a mole, what does the letter A stand for?

Asymmetry comes first, followed by an irregular border, varied colour, a diameter over 6 mm and a mole that is evolving over time.

Which scientist behind Photo 51, the image that revealed DNA's shape, died of cancer at 37 in 1958?

Rosalind Franklin died the day before she was due to unveil her structure of the tobacco mosaic virus at an international fair in Brussels.

The lawsuit behind the film Erin Brockovich accused a utility of tainting water with which metal?

Chromium in its hexavalent form, a genotoxic carcinogen, had seeped into groundwater at Hinkley, California; the class action was settled in 1996 for $333 million.

A chemotherapy drug was found by accident when Barnett Rosenberg used electrodes of which metal?

Platinum from the electrodes formed a compound that stopped his E. coli cells from growing; as cisplatin, it is now used against a number of cancers.

The cancer drugs vincristine and vinblastine come from which flowering plant native to Madagascar?

Periwinkle from Madagascar was being screened for anti-diabetic compounds in the 1950s when researchers isolated the two tumour-fighting alkaloids instead.

Which notorious poison, given as a trioxide, is now a treatment for acute promyelocytic leukaemia?

Arsenic trioxide was used in traditional Chinese medicine despite its well-known toxicity, and was approved in the United States in 2000 as Trisenox.

Laetrile, a discredited cancer remedy tied to cyanide poisoning, comes from which fruit's kernels?

Apricots are the preferred commercial source of amygdalin, the compound behind laetrile, which has been sold as 'vitamin B17' although it is not a vitamin.

Which double Nobel laureate pushed vitamin C for cancer, a claim Mayo Clinic trials did not back?

Linus Pauling rested the claim on a 1976 study with Ewan Cameron, which the National Cancer Institute criticised as poorly designed.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's semi-autobiographical novel Cancer Ward is set in which Soviet city?

Tashkent, in Soviet Uzbekistan, is where the hero arrives after a labour camp and exile, as the author had; the story unfolds in 1955, two years after Stalin's death.

In 1713 Bernardino Ramazzini noted that breast cancer struck which women more than married women?

Nuns, he argued, fell ill because celibacy unsettled their breast tissue; Ramazzini is regarded as a founder of occupational medicine for his book on workers' diseases.

Alfred Sloan and Charles Kettering, who funded a cancer institute in 1945, were executives of which firm?

General Motors chairman Sloan gave $4 million, while Kettering, its director of research, offered to organise the cancer programme along industrial lines.

Which rare cancer, first described in 1872, became one of the first illnesses linked to AIDS?

Kaposi's sarcoma is caused by a herpesvirus that takes hold when immunity is suppressed, which is why antiretroviral therapy both prevents and often treats it.

Johannes Fibiger's 1926 Nobel Prize honoured a mistaken claim that which parasites cause cancer?

Roundworms were cleared after his death: the growths he had seen were not true cancers, and they were caused by too little vitamin A in the animals' diet.

The WHO's cancer agency IARC, which ranks carcinogens, is based in which French city?

Lyon supplied the agency's headquarters building; its panels sort substances by strength of evidence, with tobacco smoke and alcoholic drinks in the top group.

Which former nurse, left £500 by a dying cancer patient, opened the first purpose-built hospice?

Cicely Saunders qualified as a doctor in 1957 and treated the bequest from Tasma, a Polish-Jewish refugee from the Warsaw Ghetto, as the seed of St Christopher's Hospice.

Siddhartha Mukherjee won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for which book, subtitled a biography of cancer?

The Emperor of All Maladies borrows its title from a nineteenth-century surgeon, and Mukherjee wrote it after a patient asked what exactly it was they were battling.

Harvard's OncoMouse, a rodent engineered to develop cancer, became the first mammal ever to be what?

Patented in the United States on behalf of Harvard, whose researchers designed it, the mouse was refused the same protection by Canada's Supreme Court in 2002.

Nancy Brinker founded a breast cancer charity in 1982 named after which sister, lost to the disease?

Susan G. Komen died in 1980 at 36, and Brinker believed her sister might have fared better had she known more about the disease and its treatment.