Haunting the Web Since 1999
A glimpse of the future: A Penn State team manage to insert synthetic nanomotors into living cells for the first time. “We might be able to use nanomotors to treat cancer and other diseases by mechanically manipulating cells from the inside. Nanomotors could perform intracellular surgery and deliver drugs noninvasively to living tissues.”
On the subject of HIV, it looks like the enemy of our enemy is our friend: In a stunning feat of gene therapy, scientists have used a disabled version of HIV to successfully defeat leukemia. “Mr. Ludwig’s doctors have not claimed that he is cured — it is too soon to tell — nor have they declared victory over leukemia on the basis of this experiment, which involved only three patients…But scientists say [this] may signify a turning point in the long struggle to develop effective gene therapies against cancer…In essence, the team is using gene therapy to accomplish something that researchers have hoped to do for decades: train a person’s own immune system to kill cancer cells.”
“‘We believe this vaccine will someday be used to prevent breast cancer in adult women in the same way that vaccines prevent polio and measles in children,’ Vincent Tuohy, Ph.D., the study’s principal investigator and an immunologist at the Lerner Institute, told WOIO. ‘If it works in humans the way it works in mice, this will be monumental. We could eliminate breast cancer,’ he added.“
Some good news for the day: Scientists at the Cleveland Clinic believe they may have zeroed in on a vaccine for breast cancer. “The key, Tuohy said, is to find a target within the tumor that isn’t typically found in a healthy person. In the case of breast cancer, he and his team targeted a-lactalbumin, a protein found in the majority of breast cancers, but not in healthy women, except during lactation. Therefore, the vaccine can rev up a woman’s immune system to target a-lactalbumin, stopping tumor formation without damaging healthy breast tissue.”
“To create melanin particles tiny enough to squeeze through the liver, lungs, and spleen, Dr. Dadachova and her team layered several coats of synthesized melanin on silica particles. The particles, once injected into mice, clung onto bone marrow, as the researchers intended.“
It’s in the air, for you and me…By way of the always illuminating Dangerous Meta, scientists find a possible way to make people radiation resistant via melanin nanoparticles. “Clinical trials testing the melanized particles on cancer patients may begin two or three years. Dr. Dadachova also surmises that the technique has potential for protecting astronauts against radiation exposure.“
“Is it conceivable that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s doctors knew he had widespread cancer in 1944 and still let him run for his fourth term as president? New research makes this astounding argument — and claims that the physician who supposedly told the truth about Roosevelt’s death in 1970 was in fact continuing the deception he had helped create.” Slate‘s Barron Lerner evaluates new claims that FDR may have suffered — and died — from cancer.
“How plausible is this research? If Roosevelt indeed had a hemianopsia, it suggests a brain mass, and melanoma would be as likely a cause as any…But all of these symptoms have other possible explanations…Perhaps most important, there is no smoking gun: In all of the documents Lomazow and Fettman unearthed, neither Bruenn nor FDR’s other doctors ever used the word cancer. Still, Lomazow and Fettman’s research is of great importance.”
A (belated) follow-up: Last year, I posted here about the efforts by major chemical companies to bury Deceit & Denial, the recent work by public health historians David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, which found that said companies knowingly obfuscated, downplayed, and generally lied about the fact that some of their products caused cancer. A few weeks ago, the other shoe dropped, when — relying on the documents unearthed by Rosner & Markowitz — a Rhode Island jury found lead paint manufacturers guilty of “public nuisance.” “The verdict on the issue of liability paves the way for a potential damage award of millions of dollars in cleanup and mitigation costs.” And, since then, California has reinstated a class-action case against the lead paint industry, and insurance companies are looking to drop the policies of lead paint manufacturers, since they “didn’t disclose the dangers of lead paint when they purchased their policies.”
Bucking the Dubya trend, Bill Frist comes out for expanded federal stem cell research. Evidently, Catkiller‘s 2008 gurus decided he should hype his M.D. and/or tack moderate — which is probably a mistake…the GOP moderates will likely stick with McCain, while the fundies may now look to Sam Brownback or some other winger freakshow as their primary hopeful. But, hey, the right thing is the right thing, even if it’s for the wrong reasons.
On the Sunday shows, Republican Senators Arlen Specter and Sam Brownback go toe-to-toe on stem cells. “Brownback questioned ‘what it does to the culture of life’ when government approves performing research on the embryos, which he considers ‘young human life.’ Specter shot back, asking what it does ‘to the culture of life when you let people die because there are medical research tools which could keep them alive?’” For what it’s worth, Specter believes the Senate has the votes to override a Bush veto, even as Boss DeLay erroneously invokes various world religions to keep the House in line.