Word: tumors
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...bouquet of flowers on the table. His face is somewhat puffy, his sensitive eyes watery at times, his neck baggy now under the thrusting jaw. But at 64, he looks fit -surprisingly so. Three years ago, Humphrey underwent a series of debilitating X-ray treatments for a bladder tumor that seemed precancerous. He had a severe reaction to the treatments and was flown from Waverly back to the Bethesda Naval Hospital. One staffer says he thought Humphrey was surely going to die. Blood transfusions and rest brought him back fast, and his doctors told him he was fully recovered. Today...
...heart disease in its annual toll. Dr. Kurt J. Isselbacher, Mallinckrodt Professor of Medicine at Mass General Hospital, has an official interest in the academic acceptance of the field. He is chairman of Harvard's cancer committee and says, as does Frei, that the basic biology of the cancer tumor, and the subtle distinctions that make its cells malignant, are valid concerns for the basic scientist/pure academic...
...Samuel Hellman, Fuller American Cancer Society Professor of Radiation Therapy and chairman of the radiation therapy department, explains that the field is oriented more towards research than towards purely clinical considerations of dosages. "There's a tremendous amount of work being done on basic biology of tumor cells to make treatment more specific," he says. Radiation's effects on the DNA, or chemical genetic messenger system, of both malignant and normal cells, for instance, is an important area of basic cancer research, Hellman adds...
Tell that to Dr. Baruj Benacerraf, Fabyan Professor of Comparative Pathology, and he will shrug expansively. Benacerraf had been studying immunology, he says, "years before cancer became fashionable," and when the two fields overlapped, he had investigated the connection. Benacerraf's experiments with transplanting mouse tumors had indicated that tumor cells prompt immune defenses by the mouse. He says that some evidence suggests that the tumor might confuse the immune system's sense of what is self; that immune mechanisms begin to treat the malignant cells as "self" and then actually encourage growth of the tumor...
Other molecular biological research on tumor cells is aimed at identifying proteins on the surface of the cell, like Folkman's Angiogenesis Factor, which are foreign to the victim. Genetically, too, "the cancer cell is of a given differentiated type that loses control of its own growth," Benacerraf says. He is on the fourth floor of Building D at the stolid gray Med School quadrangle, and when he alludes to other investigations of cancer, it is usually by reference to the floor or building on the quadrange where the research is being conducted. His only apparent bias seems...