Curing Cancer: The Story of the Men and Women Unlocking the Secrets of our Deadliest Illness - Softcover

Waldholz, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684848023 ISBN 13: 9780684848020

Verlag: Simon and Schuster, 1998

Inhaltsangabe

The recent startling discovery that a single gene prevents the cells in the body from becoming tumors marked a dramatic turning point in cancer research. Taking readers into the labs where researchers have determined that cancers are caused either genetically or environmentally by destroying this newfound gene, Curing Cancer brings to life the race to unlock cancer's genetic code. It profiles scientists such as Bert Vogelstein, who first uncovered the tumor-suppressing gene; Mary-Claire King, whose research into breast cancer is fueled by personal passion; and Mark Skolnick, whose team found two genes that may account for 10 percent of all breast cancers.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael Waldholz is a staff reporter at The Wall Street Journal. He is the coauthor, with Jerry Bishop, of Genome, a book based on their prizewinning Wall Street Journal series on the hunt for genes. Waldholz lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

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1: A Mystery Solved
In 1993, sixteen years after his death, former Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, or more accurately, a tiny part of him, participated in a remarkable experiment. Scientists in Baltimore, using new laboratory tools, solved a long-standing but little-known mystery surrounding the late politician's death. In doing so, the laboratory detectives uncovered information about Humphrey that might have changed the course of American politics in 1968.
But this experiment meant more than rewriting history; it revealed that science was in the midst of cracking open one of nature's deepest secrets: what causes cancer.
In their experiment, the scientific sleuths in Baltimore found the exact biological cause of the bladder cancer that killed Humphrey in 1978. The culprit was a tiny defect that somehow had taken hold in a single gene deep inside one of the numerous cells in Humphrey's bladder. The gene's job was to control the cell's growth. But because of the gene defect, which probably occurred early in Humphrey's life, the cell instead multiplied dangerously, over many years eventually expanding into a cell colony that is the hallmark of a cancerous and deadly tumor.
When Humphrey was diagnosed with cancer in 1971, and even when he died seven years later, nothing about this gene, not even the fact that it existed, was known. But in a series of insights in the 1980s and 1990s that turned cancer research upside down, scientists unmasked the identity of a handful of genes that work like master control switches, regulating the life cycle of a human cell. When these genes are somehow mutated, perhaps by some cancer-causing agent in the environment or by some internal mistake otherwise healthy cells outgrow their neighbors, by turn becoming unruly and rebellious. Suddenly, university biologists plumbing the arcane genetic machinery inside cells were thrust from relative obscurity into the worldwide war against cancer.
There is now reason to believe that in revealing these master switches scientists have finally found the answer to one of the greatest medical mysteries of the century: what turns a normal cell cancerous. The numerous advances that led scientists to this brilliant deduction were the result of tens of thousands of experiments, some dating back decades, whose findings became pieces of a gigantic puzzle finally put together, beginning in the late 1980s, by a relative handful of researchers. As a result, scientists the world over suddenly realize they have within their grasp the ability to search for totally new ways to detect, treat, and perhaps even someday cure cancer.
The Humphrey experiment was simply among the more dramatic and noteworthy illustrations of this new power. Indeed, the Baltimore scientists who undertook the experiment initially believed that publicizing it might draw the world's attention to the fact that, largely unseen, a breakthrough in understanding the genesis of cancer had occurred. Moreover, the scientists believed that the experiment heralded another fact: something new and powerful could now be done about the disease that reigns as one of mankind's most terrible scourges.
Humphrey, of course, was an icon of liberal American politics following World War II. In 1964, Lyndon Baines Johnson plucked Humphrey from the U.S. Senate to be his vice presidential running mate. In 1968, after Johnson declined to run for reelection and Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, Humphrey was chosen by the Democratic party to run against the Republican choice, Richard M. Nixon. Humphrey, of course, lost to Nixon in one of the closest elections in American history.
But, unknown to Humphrey, his closest advisers, and the American electorate, a renowned physician at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore suspected that the candidate for president had a dangerous tumor growing inside him. The doctor, John D. (Jack) Frost, believed he held evidence of this extraordinary fact on a set of glass microscope slides which he had been sent to analyze. For two decades Frost stored the glass slides in his office desk drawer between two cardboard envelopes. The slides contained cells harvested from a urine sample given by Humphrey more than a year before he ran for the presidency.
In May of 1967, then Vice President Humphrey was concerned when he noticed several specks of blood in his urine. Within a few days, Humphrey's private physician quietly admitted the vice president to Bethesda Naval Hospital outside Washington, D.C. As part of the routine medical workup, the hospital's doctors took urine samples. Because of Humphrey's high office, several batches of the urine sample were placed on glass laboratory slides and shipped confidentially to several of the country's foremost cytopathologists, doctors who analyze individual cells under a microscope to determine by the way they look whether they are diseased.
Frost, director of the division of cytopathology at Johns Hopkins Hospital, believed some cells on his slides had undergone changes in shape and size characteristic of the very earliest stage of cancer. But most other experts apparently disagreed, and no treatment for cancer was recommended. Instead, doctors suggested that every six months Humphrey undergo a cystoscopy, a biopsy procedure in which a catheter is threaded through a patient's urinary tract into the bladder and cells are randomly extracted from the organ's inner walls. Although it is unclear what Humphrey was told, he then vigorously pursued the political path that led him to his historic fight against Nixon.
Two years later, one of the regularly scheduled biopsy exams found that cells removed from the bladder lining had definitely undergone some slight alterations. What exactly this meant was unclear. The alterations suggested the cells were in an early stage of cancer, but there was no evidence that they had invaded the bladder wall or posed a serious danger to Humphrey. Today, a number of therapies are available to treat the problem a type of tumor known as a carcinoma in situ.
Carcinomas of this type often are indolent, meaning they aren't a threat to grow massively or spread to other organs. But in 1969 the only way to excise the potentially dangerous tissue was through major surgery. Since the risk of surgery may have exceeded the danger posed by the carcinoma, no treatment was recommended for Humphrey. "The decision was made to just follow him," says Ralph H. Hruban, a pathologist at Hopkins drawn into the case later.
In 1973, another biopsy found evidence that the carcinoma had in fact perilously invaded the bladder wall, a strong hint it might be malignant. According to Humphrey's personal physician, Edgar Berman, the medical team on the case had 11 experts analyze the biopsied cells and give their opinions. Nine of them believed the tumor was benign but recommended radiation therapy anyway, one recommended doing nothing and one was so concerned that the tumor was already malignant that he recommended surgery to remove the entire bladder.
Humphrey, who by this time had rejoined the U.S. Senate, was administered a course of radiation and chemotherapy at Memorial Kettering Cancer Center in New York. The treatment failed to halt the cancer. In August 1976, after the tumor had spread beyond the bladder, the cancerous organ was finally removed. But it was too late. In January 1978, at age 66, Humphrey died of cancer at his home in Minnesota.
About eight years later, Jack Frost, the Hopkins pathologist, was sitting in his office with Ralph Hruban, an intern at the time. "I was looking at some specimens under a microscope," Hruban recalls, "And [Frost] called me over to his desk and said, 'Let me show you something that'll wiggle your ears.'" From his middle desk drawer, Frost pulled out a worn cardboard slide case identified simply on its cover with the words, "a patient of Dr. Berman."
Frost placed the slides under...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon and Schuster
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1998
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0684848023
• ISBN 13: 9780684848020
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 328
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV, GPSR Europäische Union; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande