When you’re 8 years old, jumping rope, playing dolls, swinging on swing sets and doing homework are girlhood pursuits. Discovering “Lumpy Luey” in your left chest wall isn’t. In 1978, Stephanie Dodds’ way of coping with the diagnosis of Ewing Sarcoma was to give it a name and focus on “getting rid of it.”...
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Oncology Basics 2016 continues with a look at the immune system and immunotherapy. As described in a previous post, one of the regulators of cell division and proliferation is the immune system. Harnessing the power of the immune system to attack and destroy cancer cells is a promising area of oncology research. Immune System Cells Below is a graphic to...
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In Oncology Basics 2016 part 1, we examined the elegance of the cells that make up our body. In Oncology Basics 2016 part 2, we explored what holds the instructions for life–DNA–and the special processes of self-replication and transcription that are used to pass on and translate those instructions. Now we will try to connect the...
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The Central Dogma of Biology Doesn’t the title above sound imposing? Yet this central idea has moved biological science forward over the last 60 plus years. What we know about cells, genetics and cancer today relies on this “Dogma”: DNA carries our hereditary information and transfers that information in a process called transcription. In...
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We are made of elegant, interacting, dynamic structures called cells. The best estimate is that there are around 32 trillion cells in the human body. Today 5th graders begin to learn about cells and cell biology. But for the rest of us, who may be a bit rusty, or who aren’t as caught up with all the advances that have occurred in understanding...
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