Word: colonizers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Anyone who doubts that the pace of the genetic revolution has accelerated mightily need only consider last week's news about colon cancer. It was just last May that a team of researchers led by Dr. Bert Vogelstein at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore announced conclusive evidence that a genetic defect causes a hereditary form of colon cancer, accounting for as many as 22,000 cases in the U.S. every year. The next step was to pinpoint the malfunctioning gene, which lurked somewhere on chromosome 2. Back in the 1980s, that search might have taken three years or more. Instead...
...discovery does more than satisfy scientific curiosity. It means that researchers will now be able to save lives by developing a diagnostic test for the gene. Perhaps 1 million Americans carry it; if tested, they would be advised to have frequent colon exams. If tumors are discovered early enough, they can often be removed before the cancer spreads and becomes fatal. "This seems likely to be the first DNA test that will find its way into general clinical practice," predicts Dr. Francis Collins, who heads the Human Genome Project that is mapping all 23 pairs of human chromosomes...
...helps to scan for errors, detect them and fix them." When the spell-checking gene is damaged in some way, mistakes start piling up in other genes. Eventually some of the genes that keep cells from dividing uncontrollably are affected and cancer arises. It most often strikes the colon, but can also occur in the uterus, ovaries and other organs...
...search for the colon-cancer gene seems likely to go down in history as one of the great races of modern genetics. It was not the odds-on favorite team, led by Vogelstein, that isolated the mutated gene first, but rather a less well-known pair of biochemists from New England -- Boston's Kolodner and Richard Fishel at the University of Vermont...
Intrigued, Kolodner's research group sequenced the mutations and found that they lay in the region of chromosome 2 known to be involved in colon cancer...