Today’s New York Times reports that two groups of scientists, “one led by Allan Bradley and Martin Turner in England and the other by Klaus Rajewsky at Harvard Medical School,” have independently made major discoveries about the immune system.

“These findings demonstrate the importance of this level of control in the immune system and will lead immunologists to rethink how the immune system works,” said Dr Martin Turner, Head of the Laboratory of Lymphocyte Signalling and Development at the Babraham Institute.

According to today’s issue of the journal Science, Friday Apriil 27, the discoveries number not just 2 but 4:

In a flurry of papers, three of which appear on pages 575, 604, and 608 of this issue of Science, four independent groups have for the first time deleted mouse genes for microRNAs, RNA molecules that can modulate gene behavior, with profound effects.

(full story…)

Unique in Canada, offers right information at right time to men diagnosed with disease
ANDREA MACRAE
The Guardian

The day Norm Fotheringham got his diagnosis he knew only one thing about prostate cancer: that it was deadly.

“My brother was dying of prostate cancer. I had my operation in April and he died in June of that same year. I wouldn’t have had my prostate checked without him. So he basically saved my life.”

That was in 1998 in Ontario. Now Fotheringham helps prostate cancer patients on P.E.I. as chairman of the Prostate Cancer Support Group.

It’s his way of giving something back, he says.
Full story, The Guardian Charlottetown, PEI, Canada

When Provenge vaccine for prostate cancer is approved by the FDA, as most likely it will be on or by May 15, this decision to make this new therapy available immediately to any patient who can afford or whose insurance covers it — rather than to delay approval until the results are in from a larger clinical trial — will be due to Michael Milken. In Cora Daniels’ blockbuster article for Fortune Magazine (November 2004), The Man Who Changed Medicine, reprinted at Cptech.com, Milken said:

I believe the person who waits for 110% of the facts to be in and all the information is a person who is probably not alive — because it’s too late for him. A lot of businesspeople have been forced to make decisions without 100% or perfect information but based on what they know. I worked in a field where ten seconds was a long decision process. Either you’re buying the securities or you’re not. Either you’re selling them or you’re not. Now people said, ‘Well, gosh, that’s a short period of time,’ and I say, ‘No, it’s not.’ I’ve prepared my entire life to make that decision. I think getting off that inertia of making a decision qualifies well in building something.

(full story…)

Pages: 1 2