Cancer breaktrough
I just finished Harold Varmus’s autobiography book ‘The art and politics of science", and learnt many interesting stories on cancer research, such as the discovery of oncogene, proto-oncogene, and the Nobel Prize of the discovery. He is a great lucky scientist who not only succeeded on science but also on politics. The cancer research since 1970s has progressed a lot and many of the cancers have been curable or at least the survival rates are improved a lot. The research really helps to improve human living , that’s another sucess after the infectious diseases in the 20th century.
Here is another story caught my eye today. The gun is coupled to a natural citizen of the cell, who gain access to it easily and after come in, he bends the trigger and kill the cell. The theory is based on knowledge that tumor cells selectively take up large amounts of vitamin B12 and produce significantly more of the B12 receptor than normal cells. The study is not a new one but is progressing from mouse to dog and soon to human, that’s a long way of invention new drugs.
From all the stories, I learnt that cancer is a randomly-happen disease mainly because of the gene changes in the genes, which change the behavior of normal cells, and there will be no single therapy that can cure all the cancers, each cancer is specific, we have to find out what’s wrong first, however there are always common pathways for group of patients with similar clinical signs. In another word, one gene can lead to different cancer, and one cancer can oringinate from different genes.
