Chance, ignorance, and the paradoxes of cancer: Richard Peto on developing preventative strategies under uncertainty

During the early 1980s both cancer biology and epidemiological methods were being transformed. In 1984 the leading cancer epidemiologist Richard Peto – who, in 1981, had published the landmark Causes of Cancer with Richard Doll – wrote a short chapter on “The need for ignorance in cancer research”, in which the worlds of epidemiology and speculative Darwinian biology met. His reflections on how evolutionary theory related to cancer have become known as “Peto’s paradox”, whilst his articulation of “black box epidemiology” provided the logic of subsequent practice in the field. We reprint this sparkling and prescient example of biologically-informed epidemiological theorising at its best in this issue of the European Journal of Epidemiology, together with four commentaries that focus on different aspects of its rich content. Here were provide some contextual background to the 1984 chapter, and our own speculations regarding various paradoxes in cancer epidemiology. We suggest that one reason for the relative lack of progress in indentifying novel modifiable causes of cancer over the last 40 years may reflect such exposures being ubiquitous within environments, and discuss the lessons for epidemiology that would follow from this.