Word: cancerous
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Tuesday's approach that frightens the activists. Should Cassini pass too close to Earth and burn up in the atmosphere, they warn, radioactive plutonium in the generators that provide the craft's electricity could cause millions of cancer deaths. Most scientists and doctors scoff at such claims. Any plutonium vaporized in an accident, they explain, would be so diluted in the atmosphere that it would pose no real threat to most people. Still, activists say, had Cassini been equipped with solar panels for electricity, all danger could have been averted. But Saturn receives only a hundredth of the sunlight Earth...
...next week's approach that frightens the activists. Should Cassini pass too close to Earth and burn up in the atmosphere, they warn, radioactive plutonium in the generators that provide the craft's electricity could cause millions of cancer deaths. Most scientists and doctors scoff at such claims. Any plutonium vaporized in an accident, they explain, would be so diluted in the atmosphere that it would pose no real threat to most people. Still, activists say, had Cassini been equipped with solar panels for electricity, all danger could have been averted...
...dramatic new result traces back to a breakthrough in 1983, when the Whitehead's Robert Weinberg and colleagues showed that mouse cells would become cancerous when spiked with two altered genes. But when they tried such alterations on human cells, they didn't work. Since then, scientists have learned that mouse cells differ from human cells in an important respect: they have higher levels of an enzyme called telomerase. That enzyme keeps caplike structures called telomeres on the ends of chromosomes from getting shorter with each round of cell division. Such shortening is part of a cell's aging process...
Understanding cancer cells in the lab isn't the same as understanding how it behaves in a living body, of course. But by teasing out the key differences between normal and malignant cells, doctors may someday be able to design tests to pick up cancer in its earliest stages. The finding could also lead to drugs tailored to attack specific types of cancer, thereby lessening our dependence on tissue-destroying chemotherapy and radiation. Beyond that, the Whitehead research suggests that this stubbornly complex disease may have a simple origin, and the identification of that origin may turn...
...thank God I stopped smoking 19 years ago [NATION, July 19]. Still, the tragic photograph of Bryan Curtis, who died of lung cancer at 34, will forever be etched in my mind. Perhaps forcing the tobacco industry to place pictures of lung-cancer victims on their packs and cartons of cigarettes, along with the Surgeon General's warning, might help others stop smoking. This is a most difficult addiction to overcome, and we need to be supportive of its victims. ED LAWLER Sharon...