TCGA

The Canadian Empress

Queen of the St. Lawrence Seaway

I have just (10/12/18) returned from a delightful week touring the St. Lawrence river in a small funky boat (pictured), starting at Quebec City, visiting Montreal and other attractions, and terminating at Kingston, Ontario.  Overall, it was a blast; the scenery was very pleasant (fall colors were peaking), the food and accommodations were top-notch, the crew was a wonder to behold, and even the bar far exceeded expectations (and mine tend to be pretty high).  As to the river … it is the most impressive I have ever seen.  The Mississippi seems far smaller to me, and I have never seen the Amazon.  The Nile, Colorado, and even the Columbia are outclassed.  After all, the St. Lawrence drains the Great Lakes, as well as a vast (and soggy) swath of central North America.  Whatever: I was impressed, as you can tell.  I recommend the trip.  If you go, tell them Myrl sent you – they will give you a free liqueur. 

Oh, I should add something to my blog about travel when you’re old,

http://frivilousessays.blogspot.com/2017/12/travel-advice.html

Be sure to induce as many younger people to go with you as possible; they (being kind and overflowing with energy) will ensure that you don’t find yourself stranded on a dock or impossibly far from a wash room at a moment of urgency.  My helpers on this trip were my daughter Karen Beck, and Linda’s sister Carolyn Joyce.  It is impossible for me to thank them enough.

So, for my first blog back, I would like to turn you over to Dr. Francis Collins, Director of NIH,  for a brief summary of the history, philosophy, and promise of TCGA, The Cancer Genome Atlas,  I have written about this subject more than once over the years; the most complete (but oldest) treatment being

https://ljb-quiltcutie.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-cancer-genome-and-its-uses.html

I would like to turn you over to Dr. Collins – but I can’t, at least not directly – when I copy the Web address of the article and then open it, I am presented with another of these inscrutable computeroid “explanations” for my failure.  So, if you really are interested, Google NIH Director’s Blog and access his latest – something about frog hair.  Over on the side will be a columnar list of other topics, the bottom of which concerns the TCGA 2018 Symposium.  Click on that and you will be presented with a 15 minute U Tube video that is mildly interesting and informative, and easy to follow.

Knowing that you won’t:  here is what I got out of it.  Cancer is a condition ultimately caused by errors in the genome.  Fundamentally, then, the way to tackle it is to determine what those mistakes are and how they operate,  Only with this knowledge is it possible to counteract the effects of those mistakes – making precision medicine and immunotherapy possible.  The only feasible way to separate signal (the causative mutations) from noise (harmless, random mutations) is – as any good exploration geophysicist knows – to analyze huge data sets.  Hence the marriage of medicine and computer science – bioinformatics – and ultimately The Cancer Genome Atlas.

Constructing this blog was so laborious that I think I will post it on Facebook.  Remember, there are lots more - better, shorter, and with better pictures - at "Myrl'sBlog".