AN EXTRA FANCY DINNER IN CAIRO
Until very
recently the only weapons available to combat cancer were surgery, chemotherapy,
radiation – and, I suppose – prayer.
Radiation could be quite effective under a few circumstances; implanting
a little seed of radioactive material next to a prostate cancer, for
instance. However, under most conditions
radiation therapy required shooting a destructive beam through healthy tissue
to get at a localized cancer mass inside.
This led to nasty side effects in some cases, and was worth doing only
if the cancer hadn’t spread.
Well, now,
those tax dollars you cheerfully gave over to the National Cancer Institute have
yielded what seems to me may be a very important breakthrough. As the article cited below will explain, it
now seems to be possible to attach a tiny but nasty bit of radioactive material
to molecules engineered (by nature and/or man) to seek out and glom onto cancer
cells, thereby killing them without doing collateral damage to healthy
tissue. Furthermore, these little killer
blobs can search out metastases wherever they may hide! Nice, huh?
Read the NCI
blurb and, if necessary, make sure your oncologist has read it, too.
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