MICE TO THE RESCUE - AGAIN

Cousins

 Schneiders and Joyces

Heron Island, 2009

 



My Kansas cousin Lynda and husband Pieter have been visiting me here in Borrego Springs for a week, during which time we toured many desert washes in my magnificently dirty little jeep.  They have just left, and the many pictures of Linda above my desk remind me that it is time to get back to work.  I always have believed in the overwhelming importance of having some  purpose in life; mine for some time has been to do something positive about cancer, no matter how little.  Those pictures of Linda help keep me going.

But that aside, I have run on an article in Techtimes that is of considerable interest.  To get the Web address out of the way first:

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/131592/20160208/researchers-discover-gene-family-that-converts-cancer-cells-into-aggressively-growing-stem-cells.htm

The work here is concerned with “cancer stem cells”, about which I have written several times previously, e.g.

http://ljb-quiltcutie.blogspot.com/2012/08/cancer-stem-cells-may-they-rot-int-hell.html

Some research people at Georgetown have been working with mice (what would we do without ‘em?) for years and have found a particular murine (i.e., mouse) gene called Sca1 that is associated with fast-growing, intractable cancer.  It seems that a set of human genes, called the Ly6 family, may play a similar role.  Ly6 is located at the same chromosomal location in humans as Sca1 is in mice.  Genetic testing by the Georgetown scientists indicates that Ly6 is abundant in tumor tissue but not in normal tissue.  Apparently mutated Ly6 imparts stem-like properties; rapid, out-of-control proliferation.  Why is not clear.  The article implies that this new knowledge may lead to therapies, but doesn’t explain how.  Maybe so.  Let’s hope.

Then things trail off into stupidity.  The concluding sentence reads “It….example of what happens when researchers share data, supporting the “Cancer Moonshot” proposal announced by President Barack Obama in his…….”.  For God’s sake, how do people get the idea that scientists hoard data?  If you are an academic scientist your very life’s blood is grant money, and the only way to keep it pumping is to publish your discoveries, complete with data, as fast as your fingers can fly over the keyboard!  There is certainly lots to be said for systematizing, simplifying and making generally available the contents of tissue and blood repositories, genetic scans and the like, but if medical researchers deliberately withhold their data  I must have spent my entire scientific life in an alternate universe.  Somewhere I read that Linus Pauling, having worked out the structure of an important protein, spent a day gloating that he knew something that nobody else in the world knew.  He published the next day.