PROGRESS? PROBABLY

Linda with one of her more original quilts.

Probably 2010

The stooped figure on the left probably is me

It hit 93 at noon today.  Yesterday it was 91 at the same hour.  Both days I have bounced out of bed and headed for the desert to hike before breakfast, thus allowing myself a bit of exercise at minimum discomfort.  The rest of the day I spend indoors, sitting in front of this hungry damned computer.  I say it is hungry because at random times it suddenly eats a great chunk of whatever I am working on.  I wish I knew why.

I call it a damned computer because the heat has me out of sorts.  It is supposed to cool off soon; 93 is very hot for late winter, even in Borrego Springs.  If it hits 100 I’m out of here.

Yahoo featured an article on ovarian cancer yesterday.    It seems to have been distilled from a press release by Brown University and contains very little information that I can dig into.  I tried to obtain the original article using Google Scholar but with no luck.  There are four authors; three women in junior positions and one man who apparently heads-up  the lab.  This is a common pattern;men have the senior positions (and the better salaries), but most of the real work in is done by women.  Okay with me; women are smarter than men, and usually work harder.

The Brown group seems to have discovered that several related proteins, all called TAF with a number appended, are suspiciously represented in ovarian cancer cells.  Some are too prevalent, others too scarce.  These TAF proteins have been dismissed for years as just a workhorse in gene replication; they form parts of things called “transcription complexes” which are necessary for a gene to be “expressed”.  Now they also seem to be implicated in ovarian cancer.  How do they work?  They are always around; why do they suddenly go haywire?  If they are proteins, they must be “coded for” somewhere in the genome.  Is that where the problem lies?  Is there some epigenetic process involved?  Damned if I know; this stuff is fascinating, but it still is far beyond me.

 So, in my present state of ignorance all I glean from this article is that perhaps someday we will have another tool to combat ovarian cancer – and that molecular biology is very, very complicated.  The latter I already knew.