Word: takings
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...nanotech guys are right, a call to the family doctor a few decades from now could yield a high-tech variation on an old cliche: "Take two teaspoons of diagnostic sensors, and call me in the morning...
Treatments for more advanced cancers, however, are farther over the horizon than anybody can see. What is clear is that oncologists must take a page from aids treatment and use a cocktail of drugs with very different modes of action to outsmart tumors that have already begun to spread or metastasize...
...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...
...human cloning becomes possible--and since the birth of a sheep called Dolly, few doubt that it will be feasible to clone a person by 2025--even the link between sex organs and reproduction will be broken. You will then be able to take a cutting from your body and grow a new person, as if you were a willow tree. And if it becomes possible to screen or genetically engineer embryos to "improve" them, then in-vitro fertilization and cloning may become the rule rather than the exception among those who can afford...
...white. The former, active in young mammals (including humans), convert fat into heat rather than storing it. That's crucial in newborns, whose temperature-regulation systems aren't fully formed. As we age, the brown cells become inactive and the white, which convert dietary fat to body fat, take over. Several research teams have found that by reactivating the brown cells in an adult animal with medication, they can burn off fat dramatically. Now the doctors are looking for a genetic switch that can do the same for humans...