cancer
In breast cancer, promising approaches of twenty years ago are still…promising.
Today I talked about breast cancer to an audience already energized about Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Among other things, I told them that diseases need lobbies, and that breast cancer has one, having learned from the AIDS awareness movement, which in a momentous few years in the 1980s turned our country toward committed prevention.
But in breast cancer, science has made limited progress (more…)
In the Darwin bicentennial, new insights into fossils, genes, birdsong, and cancer.
The latest issue of Nature to land in my mailbox-the May 28th one-was not a tribute to Darwin in honor of his 200th birthday and the 150th of The Origin of Species; Nature has been there, done that. But it might as well have been another celebration for him, (more…)
Scientists should lose the hype and just get on with the work
This week I went to the funeral of an unsung great man of math education, Steve Sigur, who taught at a local school for thirty-five years. He was always described as a gentle bear of a man, and that he was.
With his great height, huge belly, and big red scraggly beard, he looked like a mountain man, (more…)
Genes in chocolate trees, cancers, and sea water are confirming Darwin and changing the world.
I knew genomics had come of age when I heard they were sequencing the chocolate genome-or the tree chocolate comes from, anyway. That’s Theobroma (”food of the gods”) cacao, which is so beset by diseases that the world’s chocolate addicts, me included, could lose our fix.
