Word: vessel
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...pirate slipping from a cove, the cancer cell severs the moorings that attach it to surrounding tissue. Slowly it extends one, two, three fingerlike probes and begins to creep. Then it detects the pulsating presence of a nearby capillary and darts between the cells that compose the blood- vessel wall. It dives into the red river that courses through lung and liver, breast and brain. An hour or so later, it surfaces on some tranquil shore, settles down and -- at the expense of its hapless neighbors -- begins to prosper...
What triggers blood-vessel formation, or angiogenesis, as the process is known? A major factor, scientists believe, is a sudden drop in the cancer cell's production of thrombospondin, a protein that inhibits the growth of new blood vessels. In the normal adult, angiogenesis is not only a rare event, but one cells strive to prevent, save for special circumstances like wound healing. For blood vessels invading joints can cause arthritis, and those invading the retina of the eye can cause blindness. To prevent such damage, cells keep blood vessels at bay by pumping out thrombospondin. At a recent scientific...
Angiogenesis is the harbinger of metastasis. The same vessels that feed the tumor also provide it with avenues of escape. Not all the myriad cells shed by tumors survive the turbulent voyage through the bloodstream, notes experimental oncologist Ann Chambers of the London Regional Cancer Centre in Ontario. But those that do eventually slip through blood-vessel walls with ease. Using a video camera attached to a microscopic lens, Chambers has watched in wonder as melanoma and breast-cancer cells, injected into mice, become lodged in capillary walls, then crawl out into the liver. Three days later, her camera resolves...
Moreover, you learn one dull Wednesday morning that you are not just another vessel for empty information in a large undergraduate crowd shuffled off from the main thrust of a University purportedly catering to its graduate students and research-conducting professors. You are not a student conditioned to aloof professors, confusing lectures, competitive classmates, a systematic process of translation-memorization-regurgitation-evacuation. You are a human being too--not just a note and test-taking machine, capable of equal fascination with The Mechanism and potential contribution to the field...
...finally meet our rescuees. Their faces are still sunburned, their hands still blistered from rowing. One is a bright-eyed 37-year-old plumber by the name of Sergio Fidel Castro Hernandez. He and five friends had slipped away after dark from a Havana beach in their little vessel made of six bus tires. For two days, they rowed and drifted in the Gulf Stream without food or water. On the second day, shortly before the rescue, they spotted another group of balseros. Odalis Peres Lopez, a 27-year-old housewife, was on that second raft. She recalls yelling...