Non-smoker lung cancer

 We've breifly written before about the strangeness of some lung cancers--notably being found in Taiwan.   See for example our June 7, 2025 blogpost.   

But today I got a note--a savage note--about non-smoker lung cancer, detailing both the death and saga of Susan Wojcicki, long-time CEO of YouTube, and key instigator of the Google founding.   Susan and her parents and siblings have long been known, and revered, in Silicon Valley among other places.

I knew Susan somewhat.   Her mother, Esther, has been a long-time researcher with my old MediaX program at Stanford, solicited by my heir there, Martha Russell.   Esther and I were both MediaX Fellows for a decade together.   Her daughter Anne founded '23 and Me', the validator of my own curious heritage to an unbelieving 2nd family circa 2008.   And Susan joined the Board of Trustees at the Computer History Museum for several years during my long sojourn there.

Susan, who never smoked, died in August, 2024, of lung cancer.   Alice Park penned an in-depth story for Time Magazine (now owned by Wojcicki family friend Mark Benioff, founder and Chairman of SalesForce), entitled "Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki died from lung cancer in 2024.  Her family is trying to find out why."  

See https://time.com/article/2026/05/12/susan-wojcicki-foundation-lung-cancer-early-detection/

The story is extremely well-written, especially for the substantial efforts that the family is now devoting to this pernicious disease.   As the article early intones, "lung cancer kills more thatn 125,000 Americans each year, more than any other cancer. . . , (BUT) up to 20% of new cases in the US and worldwide {actually greater than 60% in Taiwan} are in non-smokers.

The family has funded and begun the Susan Wojcicki Foundation to seek answers.  As Susan's widowed husband notes: "non-smoking lung cancer . . . is the fifth largest killer of all cancers in America.  It's a crisis."

As the article describes, "the sisters soon learned that lung cancer in young non-smokers is generally driven by specific genetic mutations that are not present in smoking-related lung cancer. The good news is that there are targeted therapies that address those mutations . . .  most effective if started early in the diseasse."  But of course few doctors or patients are looking for such things early, a fact that the Foundation hopes to help change.

I will not expand on the article further here, but I commend it to you for understanding.   It is one more piece of this complex puzzle about lungs, lung disease, and death sentences that is becoming, too slowly, understood.