Professor Gil Omenn of the University of Michigan and vice-president of the international Human Proteome Organisation says there is a terrible problem with over-diagnosis of relatively harmless cancers.
Genetics researchers are looking for diagnostic and treatment biomarkers to help determine which cancers are life-threatening and which are innocuous.
As for us here living locally it helps to recognise that not all cancers are going to kill us and although our lives may be shortened by cancer it might not be all that much shorter.
I often think of my mother. She died of secondary bone cancer following breast cancer. She had had a sore spot in her breast for years. It was operated on and the secondary cancer became apparent after about a year and she went on to die slowly and painfully. If she had never been operated on who knows what would have happened. Certainly she would have died. But she was also a candidate for diabetes and stroke and heart disease which might have come into the picture too.