ONCOLOGISTS KNOW that men are more prone to cancer than women; one in two men will develop some form of the disease in a lifetime, compared with one in three women.
But until recently, scientists have been unable to pinpoint why. In the past, they theorized that men were more likely than women to encounter carcinogens through factors such as cigarette smoking and factory work. Yet the ratio of men with cancer to women with cancer remained largely unchanged across time, even as women began to smoke and enter the workforce in greater numbers. Pediatric cancer specialists also noted a similar “male bias to cancer” among babies and very young children with leukemia. “It’s not simply exposures over a lifetime,” explains Andrew Lane, assistant professor of medicine and a researcher at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. “It’s something intrinsic in the male and female system.”