TCGA. You'll have to read it to find out what that means.

The world's cutest picture

 

 

Linda’s sister Carolyn sent me a tip to a news article floated by Yahoo! about The Cancer Genome Atlas.  I wrote about TCGA earlier, but I can’t remember when.  (Maybe I should keep a running  log on what I’ve already written.  That way I can avoid making myself a liar.)  Anyway, Carolyn’s article dealt with the impact of TCGA on research, especially research into targeted therapies – fitting the drug to the specific problem(s).  I made a lazy attempt to run down the original article, but to little avail.  The clues I had at hand were that the article was about TCGA, published in Cancer Research, in 2013.  No author was mentioned.  I used Google Scholar to search on “The Cancer Genome Atlas”, “Cancer Research (journal)”, and “2013”.  Guess what?  Google Scholar furnished me with 126 papers meeting all those criteria!  One of them had already been cited 13 times – in eight months!  Heck, if I got 13 hits on one of my papers in a DECADE I would feel a success.  What is the answer?  Are there whole armies of cancer researchers, all writing papers and reading the literature most of the time?  If so, when do they do their actual work?  In geology, piling up multiple papers was legitimate, because – the content of our research being of vanishingly small actual importance – amusing ones colleagues with clever essays was a acceptable goal.  Cancer researchers, on the other hand, are supposed to spend most of their time and energy working on ways  to eliminate the damned thing – emerging  only rarely to report what they’ve found.   Ideally.

When you stop to think about it, dedicated cancer researchers are expending their energy trying to put themselves out of work.  Rather like dentists who campaign for fluoridation. 

As you can clearly see, I don’t really have much to write about today.  My main reason for doing so is to repeat the picture of Linda and Patches from the last blog.  For some reason Blogspot wouldn’t let me enlarge the picture at the end of the entry.  So here it is, full scale.

Here is the link

http://news.yahoo.com/largest-cancer-gene-database-made-public-232153763.html