Word: cancerous
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...there will be drugs to trip up a cell at each of the steps it takes on the path to malignancy. A patient with lung cancer, say, might undergo gene therapy, breathing in genetically altered cold viruses that don't cause infection but instead act as miniature delivery vans carrying copies of the p53 gene. Good copies of this gene, which is mutated in many cancers, can force some cancer cells to commit suicide. The effects of p53 could be bolstered with antibodies that slow tumors by attaching to the surface of cancer cells and gumming up their ability...
...acquired the mutations for spreading, the doctor of the future may call on matrix metaloproteinase inhibitors, a new kind of drug that can be taken orally to block the enzymes a tumor uses to break down the cells of surrounding tissue and invade it. Vaccines cobbled together from whole cancer cells or bits and pieces of those cells have been shown to boost the body's immune system, helping it recognize and kill tumors on its own. "This was all a dream five years ago," marvels John Minna, director of the Hamon Center for Therapeutic Oncology Research at the University...
...assumption behind many of these futuristic scenarios is an idea that most researchers have begun to embrace but that many patients will undoubtedly find difficult to accept. That is the prediction that certain cancers may require treatment for the rest of a patient's long life. Coming out of a century that declared war on the disease, a century that felt the only reasonable response to a tumor was to annihilate it, this may be hard to imagine. But turning cancer into a controllable condition is not so different from treating high blood pressure or diabetes. "I don't think...
...probably won't cure all forms of cancer in the 21st century. But we may very well learn to live with them...
What has proved an unsustainable burden to the life of the planet is also proving unsustainable for the planet's dominant species. In China a recent shift to meat-heavy diets has been linked to increases in obesity, cardiovascular disease, breast cancer and colorectal cancer. U.S. and World Health Organization researchers have announced similar findings for other parts of the world. And then there are the growing concerns about what happens to people who eat the flesh of animals that have been pumped full of genetically modified organisms, hormones and antibiotics...