Word: mutant
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Virtually alone in the scientific community, Folkman decided it would be easier to try to kill a tumor by destroying its blood supply than by attacking it directly. His reasoning was sound. Tumors are made up of rapidly dividing mutant cells that adapt quickly to almost any treatment thrown at them. Blood vessels, by contrast, are made up of normal cells that grow much more slowly and are nowhere near as difficult to outwit. Hoping to starve tumors through their supply line of nutrients, Folkman set out to find a drug that could block the construction of new blood vessels...
...dozen have been identified as playing a role in cancer. Some are like accelerators, telling cells to grow, grow, grow. Others put the brakes on growth. Some regulate steps in cell division to make sure that DNA is copied correctly from mother to daughter cell. Some play executioner, killing mutant cells in which the copying has gone awry. Cancer is caused by errors in these genes, usually multiple errors. Though some of these errors may be inherited, most are acquired during years of living. Sunlight, cigarette smoke, environmental toxins and aging itself help these errors accumulate...
...Alive." Never have a pair of quotation marks loomed so ominously. Take the mouse-frog technology, apply it to humans, combine it with cloning, and you are become a god: with a single cell taken from, say, your finger, you produce a headless replica of yourself, a mutant twin, arguably lifeless, that becomes your own personal, precisely tissue-matched organ farm...
When prominent scientists are prepared to acquiesce in--or indeed encourage--the deliberate creation of deformed and dying quasi-human life, you know we are facing a bioethical abyss. Human beings are ends, not means. There is no grosser corruption of biotechnology than creating a human mutant and disemboweling it at our pleasure for spare parts...
Last week the Food and Drug Administration unleashed the war's ultimate weapon. It approved use of nuclear irradiation to rid beef of the mutant E. coli, as well as salmonella, listeria and other dangerous pathogens implicated in the millions of cases of food poisoning in the U.S. that cost some 9,000 lives each year. Dubbed "cold pasteurization" by the food industry, the controversy-plagued technology uses powerful gamma rays released by the common medical radioisotope cobalt 60 or streams of high-energy electrons from an accelerator. The bug-zapping power of the process is undisputed. The ionizing radiation...