SAN FRANCISCO — Scientists at an influential California agency have concluded that secondhand smoke causes breast cancer, a finding that could have broad impact on cancer research and lead to even tougher anti-smoking regulations.
"Overall, women exposed to secondhand smoke have up to a 90% greater risk of breast cancer, the report says."
Although recent studies have linked smoking to breast cancer, no major public health group, including the American Cancer Society, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute, has declared it a cause of the disease that kills 40,000 women each year in the USA.
The finding by scientists for the Air Resources Board — whose early efforts to regulate auto emissions were a model for the rest of the country — could fuel workplace smoking bans in more states. And it is likely to refocus the scientific debate over the link between smoking and breast cancer. (Related story: Firestorm could be brewing)
"I have to say without reservation it will stimulate continued and accelerated scientific evaluation of the smoking and breast cancer issue," says Terry Pechacek, associate director for science in the CDC's office on smoking and health.
A scientific review panel is expected to approve the report as early as Monday and forward it to the Air Resources Board, which has broad state authority to regulate air pollution.
The 1,200-page report analyzes new data on the extent of Californians' exposure to secondhand smoke and more than 1,000 studies of health effects from secondhand smoke.
The conclusion that secondhand smoke causes breast cancer, particularly in younger women, challenges conventional scientific thinking because most | studies, until recently, had found no connection between female smokers and breast cancer.
But California scientists based their conclusion on recent human studies that they determined had more careful assessments of long-term exposure to tobacco smoke. The report also gave more weight to toxicology evidence from animal studies than previous studies by the surgeon general and others. It's well-documented that chemicals from cigarettes cause breast cancer in lab animals.
Overall, women exposed to secondhand smoke have up to a 90% greater risk of breast cancer, the report says. It says secondhand smoke kills as many as 73,400 a year in the USA.
The report did not estimate the number of additional new breast cancer cases annually, and scientists did not calculate risk levels based on doses of secondhand smoke.
Tobacco companies, in public comments filed with the board, say the report gives little weight to studies that found no breast cancer connection.
A new surgeon general's report on secondhand smoke is expected this year.
"The topic is still under review," says the report's senior scientific editor, Jonathan Samet, an epidemiology professor at Johns Hopkins University.
"It's controversial," Samet says. "Concluding that passive smoke causes breast cancer has potentially powerful implications for tobacco control and breast cancer control. So there has been tension over it."
Those of a more religious bent, are often prone to use the "unseen Watchmaker" argument to argue in favor of there being an invisible intelligence that created the world. They use the analogy of finding a watch in the forest, and argue that it could not just have "evolved", but that there must be an "invisible watchmaker" (GOD?) that created this marvel.
Then of course, they say the human body is far more complex than a watch, and that obviously, something this wondrous and complex, also would demand the existence of an "invisible watchmaker" to explain the creation of something this intricate.
This of course begs the introduction of natural phenomena that has been studied by scientists, in which an apparent higher "order" comes spontaneously from chaotic movement.
One such spontaneous order from chaos is from a " Benard cell ". For more on this, we can look at a web site.
"The Benard cell
The "Benard instabilty" is another striking example of the instability of a stationary state giving rise to the phenomena of spontaneous self-organisation. The instability is due to a vertical temperatire gradient set up in a horizontal liquid layer. The Benard instabilty is a spectacular phenomenom. The convection motion produced actually consists of the complex spatial organisation of the system. Millions of molecules move coherently, forming hexagonal convention cells of characteristic size.
Dissipative Structures
In far from equilbrium conditions, the concept of probability that underlies Boltzmann's order principle is no longer valid in that the structures we observe do not correspond to a maximum number of complexions. Neither can they be related to a minum of the free energy F = E - TS. The tendency towards levelling out and forgetting initial conditions is no longer a general property. In this context, the age-old problem of the origin of life appears in a different perspective. It is certainly tru that life is incompatible with Boltzmann's order principal but not with the kind of behaviour that can occur in far-from-equilbrium conditions.
Classical thermodynamics leads to the concept of "equilibrium structures" such as crystals. Benard cells are structures too, but of a quite different nature. That is why we have introduced the notion of "dissipative structures", to emphasise the close association, at first paradoxical, in such situations between structure and order on the one side, and dissipation or waste on the other. Heat transfer was consdered a source of waste in classical thermodynamics. In the Benard cell it becomes a source of order.
The interaction of a system with the outside world, its embedding in nonequilibrium conditions, may become in this way the starting point for the formation of new dynamic states of matter - dissipative structures. Dissipative structures actually correspond to a form of supramolecular organisation."
We have investigated periodic and turbulent waves in excitable media and, in particular, in the Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction. We found that turbulence can be induced by high light intesity or low catalyst concentrations (in the Ru-catalyzed reaction) by oxygen, or by methanol.
The different spatiotemporal modes were analyzed by correlation analysis of video images, and they were simulated both by cellular automata (CA) and by partial differential equations. The figure below shows CA-simulations of three-dimensional waves.
There exist conditions for which a short light pulse can cause splitting into a forwards and a backwards running wave. If this is done with a spiral wave, the two resulting spirals annihilate each other.
Due to the formal analogy (analogous form of differential equations) between the BZ reaction and heart muscle, BZ-turbulence is comparable to the fatal heart fibrillation. Moreover, considering that light in the BZ-reaction corresponds to electrical current in the heart, the annihilation of spirals points to a method of controlling heart tachycardia. Formerly, we investigated the physiological clock (of yeast) due to oscillating enzymatic breakdown of sugar. Considering the coupling to membrane transport, one obtains, under certain conditions, chaotic biorhythms.
Examples of 3D waves in an excitable medium (simulations)
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