Dr. Len's Cancer Blog Launches

The American Cancer Society has launched a medical and scientific blog authored by Deputy Chief Medical Officer Len Lichtenfeld, MD.

On "Dr. Len’s Cancer Blog," at http://www.cancer.org/drlen/,  Dr. Lichtenfeld discusses breaking cancer news while helping to explain and provide commentary on new medical research, scientific developments, and other cancer breakthroughs.

The blog is targeted primarily to journalists and is intended to make tough science easier to understand. It is the latest media relations tool from the national Society designed to create awareness of cancer issues among news media thought leaders. The blog serves as a resource for writers, clinicians, and other bloggers and provides them with a source for quotes or comments for news stories. Recent topics have included colorectal cancer, quitting smoking, pancreatic cancer, lung cancer screening, cancer survivors, and prostate cancer.

Dr. Len Lichtenfeld frequently provides expert staff commentary to the news media on behalf of the Society. He manages the Society’s Cancer Control Science department, whose primary responsibilities include developing the Society’s well-known and widely respected guidelines for the prevention and early detection of cancer. In his role as deputy chief medical officer, he also interacts with many stakeholders throughout the organization nationwide.

Ah, we have an answer

I posted a little article about some research on how quickly people get an impression of a web page. It’s quick; literally in the blink of an eye.

We here’s some real science just reported from Johns Hopkins U about visual perception and how it takes place. Ties in nicely with the observation about impressions.

"Vision doesn’t happen in the eye," Connor said. "It happens at
multiple processing stages in the brain. [...]

"Humans do a rough categorization of objects very quickly,"
Connor said. "For instance, in just a tenth of a second, we can
recognize whether something we see is an animal or not. Our results
show that this immediate, rough impression probably depends on
recognizing just one or more individual parts of what we see. Fine
discriminations – such as recognizing individual faces – take longer to
happen, and our study suggests that this delay depends upon emerging
signals for combinations of shape fragments. In a sense, the brain has
to construct an internal representation of an object from disparate
pieces."

Nanotechnology safety monitored

A new report from the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars calls for a new approach to nanotechnology oversight. The report comes from one of the country’s foremost authorities on environmental research and policy, which examines the strengths and weaknesses of the current regulatory framework for nanotechnology. Considering the implications nanotechnology has for cancer treatment in the future, it is interesting to see how this group is trying to protect people from harm while looking for the benefits for medical treatment.

According to the Project, nanotechnology holds tremendous potential – for improvements in health care, the production of clean water and energy, and continued advances in our IT infrastructure,” says William K. Reilly, former EPA Administrator, commenting on the report. “But nanotechnology can only flourish if industry and government are committed to identifying and managing the possible risks to workers, consumers, and the environment. Davies’ analysis of the federal regulatory system and recommendations should spark a necessary dialogue among business, government and citizen groups about how to move forward as nanotechnology develops.”

Epigenetics and cancer

Whoa! Here’s a hypothesis about cancer from some researchers that gives the whole process a significant twist.

A Johns Hopkins researcher, with colleagues in Sweden and at the Fred Hutchinson
Cancer Research Center, suggests that the traditional view of cancer as a group
of diseases with markedly different biological properties arising from a series
of alterations within a cell’s nuclear DNA may have to give way to a more
complicated view. In the January issue of Nature Reviews Genetics, available
online Dec. 21, he and his colleagues suggest that cancers instead begin with
"epigenetic" alterations to stem cells.

 

"We’re not contradicting the view that genetic
changes occur in the development of cancers, but there also are epigenetic
changes and those come first," says lead author Andrew Feinberg, M.D., M.P.H.,
King Fahd Professor of Medicine and director of the Center for Epigenetics in
Common Human Disease at Johns Hopkins.

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