Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.
Siddhartha MukherjeeCancer was not disorganized chromosomal chaos. It was organized chromosomal chaos
Siddhartha MukherjeeThis was the tenth month of my "fellowship" in oncology - a two-year immersive medical program to train cancer specialists - and I felt as if I had gravitated to my lowest point. In those ten indescribably poignant and difficult months, dozens of patients in my care had died. I felt as if I was slowly becoming inured to the deaths and the desolation - vaccinated against the constant emotional brunt.
Siddhartha Mukherjee...turned into a horrific mistake. Lucy Willis had observed that folic acid, if administered to nutrient-deprived patients, could restore the normal genesis of blood. Farber wondered whether administering folic acid to children with leukemia might also restore normalcy to their blood. Following that tenuous trail, he obtained some synthetic folic acid, recruited a cohort of leukemic children, and started injecting folic acid into them. In the months that passed, Farber found that folic acid, far from stopping the progression of leukemia, actually accelerated it. In one patient, the white cell count nearly doubled. In another, the leukemia cells exploded into the bloodstream and sent fingerlings of malignant cells to infiltrate the skin. Farber stopped the experiment in a hurry.
Siddhartha MukherjeeThe daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, born with a precocious scientific intellect and a thirst for chemical knowledge, Elion had completed a master's degree in chemistry from New York University in 1941 while teaching high school science during the day and preforming her research for her thesis at night and on the weekends. Although highly qualified, talented, and driven, she had been unable to find a job in an academic laboratory. Frustrated by repeated rejections, she had found a position as a supermarket product supervisor. When Hitchings found Trudy Elion, who would soon become on of the most innovative synthetic chemists of her generation (and a future Nobel laureate), she was working for a food lab in New York, testing the acidity of pickles and the color of egg yolk going into mayonnaise. Rescued from a life of pickles and mayonnaise…
Siddhartha MukherjeeBut in 1960, oncology was not yet ready for this proposal. Not until several years later did it strike the board that had fired Li so hastily that the patients he had treated with the prolonged maintenance strategy would never relapse. This strategy--which cost Min Chiu Li his job--resulted in the first chemotherapeutic cure of cancer in adults.
Siddhartha MukherjeePierre and Marie (then Maria Sklodowska, a penniless Polish immigrant living in a garret in Paris) had met at the Sorbonne and been drawn to each other because of a common interest in magnetism.
Siddhartha MukherjeeMots clés science love polish curie magnetism marie-curie marie-sklodowska pierre-curie
But the pigs--seventy pounds of porcine weight that did not take kindly to weekly endoscopies--did not sprout any ulcers. And testing the theory on humans was ethically impossible: how could one justify infecting a human with a new, uncharacterized species of bacteria to prove that it caused gastritis and predisposed to cancer?
In July 1984, with his experiments stalled and his grant applications in jeopardy, Marshall performed the ultimate experiment: "On the morning of the experiment, I omitted my breakfast….Two hours later, Neil Noakes scraped a heavily inoculated 4 day culture plate of Helicobacter and dispersed the bacteria in alkaline peptone water (a kind of meat broth used to keep bacteria alive). I fasted until 10 am when Neil handed me a 200 ml beaker about one quarter full of the cloudy brown liquid. I drank it down in one gulp then fasted for the rest of the day. A few stomach gurgles occurred. Was it the bacteria or was I just hungry?
History repeats, but science reverberates.
Siddhartha MukherjeeMots clés science
The (cancer) cells, technically speaking, are immortals. The woman from whose body they were once taken has been dead for thirty years
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