So if a male has some screwy genes on his X chromosome, his dinky little Y chromosome isn’t going to be able to keep the dampers on potential tumors the way having two X chromosomes would. This problem is so characteristic of men with certain kinds of cancers, in fact, that researchers decided to call the still-active X genes EXITS: escape from X-inactivation tumor suppressors. Across twenty-one different sorts of cancers, five of these EXITS genes were more frequently mutated in men than in women. Being male, in other words, was very much a part of what was killing them. And presumably, as we
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