Rauchen und Lungenkrebs

Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher was the most famous and most productive statistician of the 20th century. Throughout his life, however, Fisher doubted the causal relationship between tobacco smoking and lung cancer. Instead, he invoked a genetic confounder to explain the statistical association between the two factors, i.e., he believed in the existence of a gene that plays a role in both cancer etiology and smoking behavior. There have been many attempts to explain Fisher’s stubbornness regarding this matter. In addition to nonscientific reasons (Fisher was himself a keen smoker) worries about the future importance of valid statistical methodology in medical research also may have played an important role. Interestingly, recent genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of smoking behavior as well as lung cancer have revealed that there may have been a grain of truth in Fisher’s idea and that his confounder may coincide with the gene encoding nicotine receptor subunit α5 on chromosome 15q25.