The first line of Wikipedia's entry states "The Armitage–Doll model is a statist... | Hacker News

Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit

		justinhj on Nov 4, 2016 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: Smoking “causes hundreds of DNA changes” The first line of Wikipedia's entry states "The Armitage–Doll model is a statistical model of carcinogenesis, proposed in 1954 by Peter Armitage and Richard Doll, which suggested that a sequence of multiple distinct genetic events preceded the onset of cancer." It's clearly a mathematical/statistical model of a phenomenon and not an explanation of the underlying processes.

nonbel on Nov 4, 2016 [–]

>"the observed relationship would be explained if a cancer cell was the end-result of seven successive mutations."

http://www.nature.com/bjc/journal/v91/n12/pdf/6602297a.pdf

That is clearly a process, not like the example of Muons and Kaons proposed to be similar (ie "A is correlated with B").

Of course, the next step is to figure out htf this process works.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact