By: Yameng Zhang Edited by: Thomas Luh On October 26th 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the cancer agency of the World Health Organization, released a monograph (a report discussing a subject in detail) evaluating the carcinogenicity of red meat and processed meat consumption (whether they are directly involved in causing cancer). … Continue reading
By Alex Bernstein Until quite recently, oncologists, despite all of the progress that has been made in the field, could at best make educated guesses when asked about survival chances by patients. When Cassandra Caton, an 18-year-old tragically diagnosed with a large melanoma growth inside her eye, asked, “Am I going to die, is my … Continue reading
By Ian MacArthur In 1978 Elizabeth Blackburn and Joseph Gall published their work on telomeres, the regions on the ends of chromosomes comprised of simple, repetitive DNA sequences. This work constituted the first venture into elucidating the nature of the structures believed to play an important role in aging and cancer. Now, scientists at the … Continue reading
The end of the Devil? Well, the Tasmanian devil that is. Sadly, that might well soon become a reality as a fatal contagious cancer is decimating the population of this marsupial. Found exclusively in Tasmania as their name suggests, devils, scientifically known as Sarcophilus harrisii, are small, primarily nocturnal scavengers with an unusually small amount … Continue reading
By Alex Bernstein In the late 1950’s, few doctors thought to take blood and urine samples for future use in long-term studies. Yet, that is exactly what Jacob Yerushalmy, a UC Berkeley biostatistics professor, began to do. These early blood samples were carefully frozen and stored with the hope to aid researchers in the future. … Continue reading
