While I’m stewing a couple of longer posts, here’s a medical breakthrough. And for once, I don’t have anything critical to say about it. I’m all gee-whiz-isn’t-science-awesome!
Science Daily announces that a team headed by Dr. William Dooley of the University of Oklahoma has developed a technique to radically shrink large breast tumors. The study is not out yet (it’ll appear in the Annals of Surgical Oncology), so here’s what Science Daily reports:
They are working on a treatment called Focused Microwave Thermotherapy. The technique, which was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, uses a modified version of the microwave technology behind the “Star Wars” defense system.
In the most recent study, researchers tested the therapy on tumors that were an inch to an inch and a half in size. These large tumors usually require mastectomies. When researchers used the heating therapy within two hours of patients receiving chemotherapy, the tumor was more susceptible to the chemotherapy and shrunk rapidly. The percentage of patients needing mastectomies was reduced from 75 percent to 7 percent.
(More here.)
In other words, only a tenth of the women who would’ve needed a mastectomy ended up having one.
In their next step, the researchers will zap tumors as large as five inches. (I cringe at the idea that a tumor could grow that large without detection. We’re talking about the size of a small melons. My entire breast isn’t five inches in diameter.) In theory, the therapy could be applied to any organ that can be immobilized.
So this is really, really cool. It’s also making me rue my role in the Star Wars program – Reagan’s, that is, not Darth Vader’s. Back in the summer of 1984, I worked as a lab assistant at Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto. I was supposed to grow laser crystals. The specifications were tight. The equipment was old. Control of the reactor was all manual. I grew a lot of crystals, measured them, tested them, watched them fail. This went on all summer. Donuts were served daily, and they were scrumptious. Only at the end of the summer did I learn that those useless wafers were all intended for Reagan’s Star Wars initiative.
I felt much better.
But now I wonder. What if our failed research could have fed into a great peacetime medical application, as this thermotherapy process promises to be? How many other projects funded by the DoD, Department of Energy, etc. might spawn brilliant but overlooked civilian applications? I mean, I know we’ve got computers and the Internet thanks to DoD, but what other wonders might be hiding in their junk closets?
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