Word: tumorous
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...story is one of distinction and poignant drama. Her great-grandfather H.H. Asquith was Prime Minister in the very years (1908-16) when so many of her films are set. Her father, a Harvard business school graduate, was a successful banker until, after an operation for a benign brain tumor, he suffered a paralyzing stroke. Helena has her looks from her mother, a psychotherapist of Franco-Spanish-Austro-Russian-Jewish ancestry. She lived with her parents until she was 30, when she bought an apartment a few minutes from their London home. "I'm not stretching the umbilical cord very...
...many emerge from their pre-university cocoons as some version of that smarmy first-year in your section who always does the reading and asks if he or she can hand his or her paper in early. After this adolescent phase (often marked by the growth of a large, tumor-like "thesis"), spawning begins, and we find colonies of proto-TFs developing in warm, dark places such as Loker and the Gato Rojo Cafe. Thriving on response papers and underused undergraduate brain cells, TFs have become one of the most populous species at the University...
...first, Black applies a mild electric current to a part of the body--the wrist, for example--and then touches electrodes to exposed brain areas. It is like an electrician testing a circuit: wherever he picks up current, he knows he has a live connection, indicating that the tumor is entwined with eloquent brain and cannot just be cut out. Otherwise, he is touching inert tumor tissue. Conversely, with direct stimulation, Black applies the current to the tumor and sees if the body twitches in response...
...essentially bringing functional MRI into the operating room in real time. This would permit a surgeon to re-image the brain constantly during surgery in order to observe the changing geography of the brain as the operation progresses. Black is also seeking advances in noninvasive surgery, used when a tumor is so deeply embedded in eloquent tissue that it cannot be cut out. Surgeons now use focused beams of X rays to kill cancer tissue, but because these devices rely on radiation to destroy tumors, they can be used only sparingly. And because tumors killed this way take months...
Instead, Black began to use radio waves, which cook the cancer to death right away. A few years ago, he developed a treatment that uses an MRI-guided radio-wave probe to reach into a tumor. The procedure can be performed under local anesthesia on an outpatient basis and be repeated as needed. Now Black wants to eliminate even this mildly invasive probe with something he calls the MedArray. The prototype, which Black expects to be ready for trials next year, looks like an MRI with microwave antennas lining the chamber. Using the MRI's images, the MedArray computer maps...