About 5 % of the people that develop anterior of the mouth oral cancers have none of the known risk factors. We just rewrote the home page of the OCF web site to include this statement. It is generally believed that like most things, we are genetically predisposed to get something, or genetically protected from it, and we don't know enough to unravel that mystery at this time. For those of us on the bad side of the gene pool, when it comes to cancers, we can thank our grandparents and their grandparents. It is just the luck of the draw.

I can see that at some time in the distant future we will not only have mapped the human genome (which we have) but we will understand what genes do what better than we do today, as well as have a fuller understanding of the human proteome. Treatments will be genetically based gene replacements and splicings to correct predispositions to many disease states when the aberration is discovered and corrected before disease develops.

While some worry that this "engineering of the human race" could lead to evil things, it is the direction that science is moving in. Even oral cancer early diagnosis is moving that way. The research OCF has sponsored with Dr. Wong at UCLA on salivary diagnostics is all based on mapping genomic and proteomic markers known to be associated with the disease development. We already have a test that can tell who out of 300 million people have the markers to develop oral cancer. It likely, at least in oral cancer, will be a test that is commercially available in the next 5 years.