Today I found this while browsing The Economist in a bookstore in Dundee. Some time ago researchers found that cervical cancer is produced by a virus. This raises the interesting question of what is the proportion and nature of the cancers that are initiated by a virus.
More recently researchers in San Francisco found something interesting about glioblastomas, one of the most deadly types of cancer that originates in the glial cells in the brain.
Whether glioblastomas are initiated by a virus or not is not clear, but these researchers found that in most cases (90%) the abnormal glial cells contain cytomegalovirus. This finding has been taken up by researchers at Duke who have designed a vaccine designed to train the immune system to recognise and target cells that contain this virus. Since the process of training one’s immune system to recognise viruses is rather well understood and given that killing the glial cells with a virus will kill all tumour cells that looks like a promising idea. Preliminary results seem to be good, let’s keep fingers crossed!
David, I read it on The Economist, too. Looks promising indeed.
Hi Massimo,
Whatever opinion you (or anyone) could have about the newspaper (as they like to be known), their science section tends to be rather decent.
I think that the Science section of The Economist is very well written and there is something to learn there about their writing style also for “us” scientists.
Hummm…writing style. That almost looks like a nice topic for another post? I heard/read before that scientific papers have to be written, by their very nature, in a different language than, say, The Economist. But a quick scan through the style guide tells me that most of the recommendations are applicable to scientific papers…or blogs (should be a bit more careful about style from now on!)
David,
possibly, scientific writing may not be that thoroughly different from good writing. There was a discussion, also including a Nature Editor, here
Ciao!