Paging An Editor: Life Begins With Pancreatic Cancer

My friend Dietsch gets credit for spotting this editing oddity in this NY Times obituary of biochemist Leslie Orgel:

Dr. Orgel had also advanced a novel idea about life’s possible arrival from outer space.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said a spokesman for the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, where Dr. Orgel had been on the faculty since 1964.

Maybe our extraterrestrial forebears were dying of pancreatic cancer and left their home world to seek a cure?