We had just been to Ecuador
Memorial
Sloan Kettering (MSK) is located in New York City (NYC). People must like NYC, because an awful lot of
them live there. Me, I would hate to
live in NYC – but I would, if I had the training to work for MSK. MSK must be the best cancer research center
in the world.
NCI
(National Cancer Institute) furnishes proof of what I just claimed. To read it, go to
and you will
learn a lot..
When I was
in high school we had a science graduation requirement. The sciences offered were physics, chemistry,
biology, and general science. You had to
suffer through two of them. Most kids
who simply wanted to get out of school took general science and biology. Kids who thought they might try college took
biology and chemistry. A few of us took
chemistry and physics. The ones who
chose biology did so by reason of math anxiety.
The point is that biology was thought to be completely descriptive – no math,
no formulae, only little knives and microscopes. I regarded
bio types as nincompoops.
Well, it ain’t
that way no more, Zeke. At least it isn’t
where cancer research is concerned. MSK
has developed a program they call MSK-IMPACT.
It involves rapid DNA sequencing of multiple cancer types and includes
matching cancer mutations to “clinically actionable” drugs, as well as on-going
or prospective clinical trials. All this
is a part of what has become known as “bioinformatics”, which seems to be a
sort of polygamous marriage between technology, computer science, physics and
math. My cup of tea.
I’m not
going to try to explain MSK-IMPACT and how it’s used. If I did I would almost certainly screw it up. Be satisfied to know that there are people
out there who smile at the challenge of making sense of mountainous piles of
obscure data. And don’t let Donald Trump
shut them down!
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