Is the Cure for Cancer Inside You?
Some say the ‘last frontier is space, while other, more terrestrial based scientists, say the oceans are the last frontier. In fact a very good argument can be made that medicine ought to be regarded as that last great unknown about to be explored and whose revealed secrets may change just about everything as we know it.
Medical breakthroughs are becoming more common everyday. While there are a plethora of new drugs there are also new breakthroughs in DNA genetic engineering. There now exists the potential capacity to manipulate our health at the cellular level- possibly before we are even born. There are now drugs which can be tailor made specifically for each of us.
What are the implications of diseases cured? How will living longer and healthier lives affect our culture? Our economy? Our politics? Our families?
The science may prove to be the easier issues we have to deal with.
Is the Cure for Cancer Inside You? « Sigmund, Carl and Alfred
Claudia Steinman saw her husband’s BlackBerry blinking in the dark. It had gone untouched for several days, in a bowl beside his keys, the last thing on anybody’s mind. But about an hour before sunrise, she got up to get a glass of water and, while padding toward the kitchen, found an e-mail time-stamped early that morning — “Sent: Monday, Oct. 3, 2011, 5:23 a.m. Subject: Nobel Prize. Message: Dear Dr. Steinman, I have good news for you. The Nobel Assembly has today decided to award you the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 2011.” Before she finished reading, Claudia was hollering at her daughter to wake up. “Dad got the Nobel!” she cried. Alexis, still half-asleep, told her she was crazy. Her father had been dead for three days.
The Nobel Foundation doesn’t allow posthumous awards, so when news of Ralph Steinman’s death reached Stockholm a few hours later, a minor intrigue ensued over whether the committee would have to rescind the prize. It would not, in fact; but while newspapers stressed the medal mishap (“Nobel jury left red-faced by death of laureate”), they spent less time on the strange story behind the gaffe. That Steinman’s eligibility was even in question, that he’d been dead for just three days instead of, say, three years, was itself a minor miracle.
In the spring of 2007, Steinman, a 64-year-old senior physician and research immunologist at Rockefeller University in New York, had come home from a ski trip with a bad case of diarrhea, and a few days later he showed up for work with yellow eyes and yellow skin — symptoms of a cancerous mass the size of a kiwi that was growing on the head of his pancreas. Soon he learned that the disease had made its way into nearby lymph nodes. Among patients with his condition, 80 percent are dead within the first year; another 90 percent die the year after that. When he told his children about the tumor over Skype, he said, “Don’t Google it.”