Fifteen puffs to eternity

For those who think smoking cigarettes brings them to heaven, a very important and recent study just confirmed that it really does get you there (or wherever it is one goes after death). And they have a number to help you stay on track with your eternal plan: 15 cigarettes. 

For the first time ever, researchers have looked at the cancer cells of patients, compared it with healthy ones and revealed how many cigarettes it takes to nudge you closer to eternity. This was done under the Cancer Genome Project at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK. For decades now, doctors have fought long and hard to warn the public that smoking is no longer a game of chance with cancer; more often, it is certain. If not cancer, then there will be other illnesses brought on by smoking like emphysema and other respiratory diseases that are so debilitating, you would not even be thankful even one bit that it is not cancer that got you.

This landmark works are published in two entries in the journal Nature — one for small cell lung cancer which is most often caused by smoking, and malignant melanoma (skin cancer). In the studies, they studied all the characteristics of the genes that comprise the cancer cells of a 54-year-old lung cancer patient and a 45-year-old patient with skin cancer and compared it with healthy cells. For lung cancer, the researchers found that the approximately 60 chemicals that are in cigarettes stick to DNA and change it on its way to being cancerous. A change in DNA is called a mutation. Mutation is a natural process that cells undergo but these mutations seen here are the ones that led to cancer induced by tobacco smoke. And this is their very strong finding: it only takes 15 cigarettes for you to have a permanent mutation toward cancer.

When the scientists calculated the mutations, the total mutations a normal healthy cell makes to become a malignant tumor is about 23,0000. This totals to about 345,000 cigarettes. That seems a whole lot but if you have been smoking at least a pack a day since you were 17, you are most likely going to develop cancer by the time you are 64. If you smoke two packs a day, your most likely year will be around 40. For skin cancer, a healthy cell takes about 33,000 mutations.

This Cancer Genome Project is a 10-year project bent on examining the details of 50 kinds of cancer cells. It will help medical professionals come up with treatments for these diseases knowing the rate and stages of mutations that a healthy cell undergoes to becoming cancerous.

I latched on to this finding which I first saw in an article by Ian Sample in The Guardian online last Dec. 16, because I grew up in a household where both my parents smoked up until I was in high school. My parents belonged to the Baby Boomer generation which meant it was the coolest thing to smoke. All of us kids have weak lungs (my father acknowledged that their smoking must have played a part). By the time I was in college, I developed a severe reaction to second-hand smoke and by the time I started working, I developed asthma. Because of that, my social life since then, has, I think, been defined partly by places and people who do not smoke or at least, do not smoke when I am around. I have foregone my chances to see great musicians live because more often, the places where they perform are up in cigarette smoke. Other places make the token but empty gesture of separating the smoking section which obviously means they are in denial that “smoke” is air and as such, will move when and where it can.

Our parents stopped smoking when I was in high school after I recruited my two siblings to wage the teenage equivalent of a “stop work protest” until our parents quit smoking. There were enough things to deal with at home emotionally as a teenager and I figured we did not need the extra smoke to signal the fires we have to put out in family life. They have both stopped smoking since then. I am not sure though if they quit because of our protest or their own awakening that we their kids were always sick with some respiratory malady.

Now when I take a walk outside my office building, I see kids in their early 20s, working in call centers or business processing offices who on their breaks, habitually smoke. I do not know how many sticks you consume kiddos but remember, all it takes is 15 cigarettes to define a permanent step to cancer. Let’s see you process that and still take that stick and puff yourself toward eternity.

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