Mt. St. Helens, a few years ago.
If that tree is vertical, then the concrete pillar is snuzzling up to her.
Weird
The link above will lead you to an interesting and very
informative article in the New Yorker Magazine.
It is written by a journalist who specializes in medicine and
biology. It is easy to understand. Like all New Yorker articles it is over-long;
it says in 23 pages what the Economist would
say in two, and The Week might stuff
into two terse paragraphs. But
read it anyway. You will be glad
you did.
I am sure that New
Yorker authors are paid by the word.
The main point here seems to be that there is a
new way to deal with cancer. Mainly, of
course, we try to avoid it entirely. We stop smoking. We have our fallopian tubes removed. We avoid asbestos. We stay thin.
We eat “right” (whatever that is.)
We try to avoid having a family history of cancer. (Well, that is impossible, of course, but it
would help if we could.) But sometimes
we get cancer, anyway. Then what to do?
Well, heretofore our only recourse in that event is to kill
the cancer cells. We cut them out,
poison them with chemo drugs, blast them with X-rays, and pray. According to this article there is another
route: we can teach the damned cancer cells to behave themselves. We can persuade (trick? force?) them to grow
up and behave like normal cells. There
are several drugs in clinical trial or on the market that attempt to do just that,
with encouraging results.
I am going to quote from the article. The author was once a practicing physician,
specializing in blood diseases and oncology.
He states that”
“In medical school we were taught that, although cancer
comes in many forms, it has one immutable characteristic: it is composed of immature
cells”.
I underlined the word
“immature” in the previous sentence because it is the cornerstone of this sort
of therapy: the drugs being developed force the cancer cells to “mature”. How they do it is interesting and
complicated: I will let you puzzle it out for yourselves. However: here is a hint. Molecules responsible for cancerous behavior
can do so because they have a certain precise shape, enabling them to glom onto
other cells and shut them down, activate them, or otherwise change their behavior.
If we humans can devise other molecules with precisely the right shape
to glom onto these bad actors and immobilize them before they do their damage, then – game over! I have been gloomy lately (about cancer, that is); this article has cheered me up.
Joanne Ingwall alerted me to this essay. She and Dick keep me busy – for which I am
very grateful.
Finally, I have recently engaged in an email exchange with a
former graduate student and valued colleague, who told me that he enjoys the
pictures I put in my blog. When I
thanked him and mentioned the text he said, in effect “Oh? Is there text?” Well, I mostly made that up, but it serves my purpose - I know many of you enjoy the picture, then say "Oh, what is he on about this time?" and cut to Facebook. I can't really blame you, but - please read this one. It's good.
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