When it comes to advocacy and research money, the leading cancer killer in the United States — lung cancer — clearly gets short shrift. People with the disease are commonly assumed to have brought it upon themselves by smoking. And the 10 percent to 15 percent of lung cancer patients who never smoked are typically tarred with the same brush.

There are two things wrong here, according to clinicians who treat this killer of nearly 160,000 people a year — more than deaths from cancers of the breast, prostate and colon combined.

One is the element of blame, as if all smokers who get lung cancer began smoking and continued to smoke knowing the possible consequences.