Today is a great day not to be a turkey

Special Dispatch #5 Thanksgiving, 2008

We’re counting down reasons to be thankful to live in such an amazing
world all Thanksgiving weekend long. Here’s item 5.

 

Item 5

Scientists
Decode Set of Cancer Genes

For the first time, researchers have decoded all the genes of a person with
cancer and found a set of mutations that may have caused the disease or aided
its progression.

Using cells donated by a woman in her 50s who died of leukemia, the scientists
sequenced all the DNA from her cancer cells and compared it to the DNA from
her own normal, healthy skin cells. Then, they zeroed in on 10 mutations that
occurred only in the cancer cells, apparently spurring abnormal growth, preventing
the cells from suppressing that growth and enabling them to fight off chemotherapy.

The Good News

Since most cancer is not inherited, understanding the mutations that contribute
to cancer in an individual provides hope for providing personalized cancer therapies
based on the patient’s genetic profile. This could be the key to understanding
why some therapies work better than others for certain patients, and helping
to get all patients onto the course of treatment best suited for the way their
bodies are likely to react.

Moreover, a broader understanding of the "cancer genome" can only
lead to a better understanding of cancer and the development of even more effective
treatments for it.

 

 

Live to see it!

Things you might have guessed you wouldn’t live to see, but you did!

Special Dispatch #4 Thanksgiving, 2008

We’ll keep churning out the good news items all Thanksgiving weekend
long.

 

Item 4

Passenger
space travel ‘by middle of next decade’

Passengers will be able to fly through space from London to New York in 45
minutes by the middle of the next decade, experts believe.

Sydney could be only two and a half hours away and it could take less time
to get to Tokyo than it does to take a train from London to Manchester.

Walter Peeters, dean of the International Space University in Strasbourg,
said that what has been regarded as the stuff of science fiction is close
to becoming reality.

He is among a number of scientists who are convinced that "space tourism"
and "sub-orbital point to point travel" (SPTP) are on the point
of becoming a flourishing industries.

The former is aimed at the well-heeled who are ready to dig deep in their
pockets for the experience of space travel for its own sake which on Virgin
Galactic is $200,000 or around £125,000.

But this is just a staging post for the ultimate goal, traveling through
space to get from one side of the globe to the other in a couple of hours.

The advocates of SPTP see it as the 21st century equivalent of taking a trip
on Concorde – and appealing to the same sort of clientele.

The Good News

Space tourism and sub-orbital point-to-point travel (SPTP) have been the stuff
of "the future" my entire life. Some of us were disappointed when
SPTP didn’t show up in the latter decades of the previous century — there was
a time when we definitely seemed to be heading in that direction — but nobody
ever really expected space tourism. That is to say, there weren’t any timetables
associated with it. It was wacky, far-out stuff: something that would come
along only after the serious applications of rocket technology were given the
chance to prove themselves.

How interesting that it now seems that space tourism might be the business
model that enables the development of SPTP. Didn’t see that one coming,
now did we?

The Downside

Such travel will not come cheap. One estimate suggests a ticket for a round
trip taking in London, Tokyo and New York would cost more than £43,000.

Yeeouch! That’s like, more than 100,000 US dollars for one trip.

On the other hand — don’t worry. Those are 2050 pounds / dollars we’re talking
about. Plus, the price is bound to go down from there.

 

Live to see it!