Great news for the cancerphobic, by which I mean everyone: Scientists have cracked the cancer genome! Or at least they've done it for lung and skin cancer, two of the scariest varieties. This is an enormous breakthrough for cancer research that's going to lead to prevention and treatments--indeed, it ushers in an entire new era in the fight against cancer.
I learned all this from a Reuters article ("Gene maps to transform scientists' work on cancer") describing newly published research from a team of scientists. Unfortunately, the article is stunningly misleading, so please put everything I said above right out of your mind. Sure, some really fine science took place here, and some day we may get something from it. But it's fundamental research that is of little or no foreseeable relevance to your or my prospects for getting lung or skin cancer, or for having much luck with treatment if we do.
I learned all this from a Reuters article ("Gene maps to transform scientists' work on cancer") describing newly published research from a team of scientists. Unfortunately, the article is stunningly misleading, so please put everything I said above right out of your mind. Sure, some really fine science took place here, and some day we may get something from it. But it's fundamental research that is of little or no foreseeable relevance to your or my prospects for getting lung or skin cancer, or for having much luck with treatment if we do.
- 12/17/2009
- by David H. Freedman
- Fast Company
Photographs by Phillip Toledano
When the human genome was first sequenced nearly a decade ago, the world lit up with talk about how new gene-specific drugs would help us cheat death. Well, the verdict is in: Keep eating those greens.
Photographs by Phillip Toledano
Ernest Hemingway's writing may have tended to the short and sharp, but the man himself was apparently fond of the cuddly and extraneous, at least when it came to kittens with too many toes. A sea-captain friend of Hemingway's, it seems, persuaded him to take in a polydactylic cat, and that cat became the progenitor of a colony of overly toed felines thriving today in and around the museum in Key West that was Hemingway's home. The patterns of inheritance among those cats have even helped shed a bit of light on certain defects in human DNA. And so it is that Papa retroactively became...
When the human genome was first sequenced nearly a decade ago, the world lit up with talk about how new gene-specific drugs would help us cheat death. Well, the verdict is in: Keep eating those greens.
Photographs by Phillip Toledano
Ernest Hemingway's writing may have tended to the short and sharp, but the man himself was apparently fond of the cuddly and extraneous, at least when it came to kittens with too many toes. A sea-captain friend of Hemingway's, it seems, persuaded him to take in a polydactylic cat, and that cat became the progenitor of a colony of overly toed felines thriving today in and around the museum in Key West that was Hemingway's home. The patterns of inheritance among those cats have even helped shed a bit of light on certain defects in human DNA. And so it is that Papa retroactively became...
- 11/2/2009
- by David H. Freedman
- Fast Company
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