Word: idea
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Woolery laughs off the idea that the show's rules are too byzantine. "Can you imagine Abner Doubleday trying to sell baseball as a parlor game?" And the answer is no. But then, baseball didn't have to become the national pastime in its first three games...
...oddly, a musicalized version of James Joyce's somber short story has been one of the most anticipated events of the off-Broadway season. A star-filled cast (Christopher Walken, Blair Brown, Sally Ann Howes) has perked up interest in what is either the most intriguing or the stupidest idea for a musical in years...
...idea of implanting brain stem cells, while not as dramatic as swapping whole brains, also raises intriguing philosophical questions. "Sometimes at seminars when I talk about my work," says Snyder, "somebody will ask me whether the introduction of these stem cells will alter memory." Do the newly generated cells distort or erase old memories? Or will the transplanted stem cells bring with them memories of their upbringing in a Petri dish...
Also close to reality are the so-called antiangiogenic factors, relatively nontoxic compounds that inhibit the growth of new capillaries. The idea behind this new class of drugs is that tumors cannot grow bigger than a few hundred thousand cells--about the size of a peppercorn--without growing their own blood-supply system. Researchers and patients, not to mention the owners of stock in half a dozen biotech companies, are eagerly awaiting results of clinical trials of antiangiogenic factors, which might be used in combination with chemotherapy to knock down big tumors and then prevent any surviving tumors from growing...
...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...