TWO NEW WORDS, and possibly a new medicine.

Linda and her sister-in-law Raelyn Joyce

Celebrating New Years in the usual Joyce tradition

 

Wow!  Two impressively big and obscure words in one paragraph!  The article cited below treats of the use of Mullerian inhibitory factor to treat cases of ovarian cancer that have relapsed and are resistant to chemotherapy.  In case you don’t like Mullerian, try Paramesonephric.  Does that help?  Well, all I can say is “Thank God for Wikipedia”. 

So, it works like this.  All embryos originally have two things called Mullerian or Paramesonephric ducts.  In girls these develop into the necessary reproductive machinery; it boys they are “suppressed” by something called Mullerian (or, of course, Paramesonephric) inhibitory factor.  This is a protein, produced in the usual way, by decoding a gene.  It appears that scientists from Harvard and elsewhere have discovered that, by modifying the gene slightly and using a standard virus “vector” they can obtain an abundant supply of a very similar protein which, in mice, (if you want to sound professional you say “in a murine model”) is effective in curbing growth of ovarian cancer.  Why this works is not explained, but just as well:  I wouldn’t understand it anyway and neither, probably, would you.  Let’s just hope it works in people.

Here is the article:

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2015/07/recurrent-ovarian-cancer-patients-may-have-hope/

So, my two great grandkids were here over the weekend.  They are nearly of an age; approximately 1.7 years old.  They clearly are superior beings, destined for great things.  You can tell that by the way they throw green Asian pears into a bucket of water, say “apple”, and then fish them out again.  I was six before I could do that.