Entries Tagged 'Science' ↓

An interesting article today on Chronic Myeloid Leukemia, the disease my wife has in remission thanks to Gleevec.

CML in its chronic phase can be treated with Gleevec and most patients respond well to it. But unfortunately, some do not. The disease can progress to what is called ‘blast phase’ where things go from bad to worse in a hurry.

Today’s article has to do with an apparent discovery of the cause for the transition from chronic to blast phase. Here it is:

They found that chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) progresses when immature white blood cells lose a molecule called miR-328.

That’s it. The white blood cells lose ONE MOLECULE. (The disease is initially caused by a mutation resulting from one part of one chromosome breaking off and reattaching itself to the DNA in a different spot on the chain.)

That isn’t much of a big deal to kill you, eh? One chromosome mutates and soon you have a chronic and life threatening disease. Left untreated, after some time, one white blood cell loses ONE molecule (and then many follow), and suddenly you are in blast phase. And shortly after that, if untreated, you are gone from this world.

A couple of observations:

1. Are their any good mutations? How can anyone believe that chance can produce any beneficial change in any organism that is then perpetuated to new generations? Every part of our body is essential. All it takes to kill you is one chromosome change and one molecule loss. Mutations are not good.
2. What a mighty God we serve! He designed us, in all our complexity, to live as we do in a complex, interdependent world. His mind conceived it all. Though the struggle with cancer can be daunting and is often tragic, it ought to remind us of how great God is.

P.S., I am working on an article to follow up my ‘godliness’ post a few days ago. It is getting longer and longer as I work. Maybe it should be more than one post. It will definitely become a series in our Bible Study time at our church. I think the idea of godliness (godly living) is vital for Christians in our world. So more is coming… in the meantime I am putting up links to things that interest me…

An interview in the New York Times reminds me of a great blessing from God our family received a little over six years ago.

I have written about this before, but I just want to again give praise to the Lord for the gifts he gives to men.

Six and a half years ago, my wife began to lose weight rapidly and was bruising easily. She was becoming more and more exhausted each day. (She was enjoying the weight loss part!) We called our doctor who immediately got the ball rolling in our health care system, no small feat. The diagnosis was Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia (CML). Our hematologist was very upbeat, however. The new therapy for this disease was a drug called Gleevec, just approved for CML treatment two years previously. We haven’t looked back. Gleevec has very minimal side-effects (we haven’t really noticed any). My wife is living a normal life.

The interview with Bryan Druker, the doctor in charge of developing Gleevec reminded me of how close my dear wife was to death’s door:

The problem [with a CML diagnosis] was that the death rate in the first year was 25 to 50 percent.

The life expectancy after diagnosis before Gleevec was about 5 years. And the previous treatments would make those years pretty miserable.

This interview gives you a bit of insight into the persistence and dedication of Dr. Druker in bringing Gleevec into production. It is now approved for ten different forms of cancer, but is most successful with CML, I believe.

My wife takes a couple of little orange pills every morning and God has given her six and a half years of normal life. If there is a drawback, as I was commenting to a friend, is that she would have been in heaven these last five years or so … instead, she gets to live with me.

Maybe there is a purgatory?

This week is one of those weeks… a mad dash up and down the Island with many activities and responsibilities. Monday we had a service in a local senior’s condominium. Tuesday we had our Mid-Week service with a trio from Crown College. Wednesday I met with one of our men and a new convert who he is helping get established in the faith. I was also up-Island to meet with a young couple to be married on Friday and met with a pastor friend, working on helping him get a life insurance company to pay out after his wife’s passing in March (we succeeded, praise the Lord!). Tonight we have a Bible-study in the home of some of our people who live 45 minutes up-Island from us. Tomorrow is the wedding I mentioned. And next week is Family Camp. so I have to really work on getting messages ready for two Sundays and for Camp.

Whew! Not complaining, I relish the activity. But I suspect I won’t be blogging a lot over the next few days.

Here are a few things that caught my eye. Some of them would be good for the illustration file:

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I remember the exciting days of the Apollo program very well. I remember the breathless excitement of hearing Neil Armstrong’s famous words come crackling over a transistor radio as we boys listened in our bunks the first night of our week at camp.

Do you know how powerful the technology was that controlled that mission?

The flight computer onboard the Lunar Excursion Module, which landed on the Moon during the Apollo program, had a whopping 4 kilobytes of RAM and a 74 KB "hard drive." In places, the craft’s outer skin was as thin as two sheets of aluminum foil.

That was then.

This is now. NASA’s plans for the coming longer moon missions are much more elaborate with much more sophisticated equipment. You can read about some of it at the link above.

The many extremes faced by astronauts heading for the moon, and later, they hope, to Mars, seem to reinforce the notion that the earth is truly the only home of life in the universe. (Can’t prove it, but it is a notion I hold nonetheless.)

How inhospitable the rest of creation seems to be!

And how fascinating!

A couple of recent articles of interest to me… on science and a startling admission, on culture, politics, Steynism, and a parallel in church circles, and on an interview with an alleged Anglican ‘conservative’.

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Gleevec is the drug that gives my wife a normal life. She has CML, chronic mylogenous leukemia. Gleevec puts this disease in remission and keeps it there with little to no side-effects.

Today, a story about another disease, neurofibromatosis, which affects one in 3500 births. Research is being conducted to see if this disease, which makes the patient disposed to very difficult to treat cancerous tumours, can benefit from Gleevec. This story contains this hopeful little paragraph:

While the research was being conducted in animal models, a critically ill three-year-old patient presented at Riley Hospital for Children with a plexiform neurofibroma that was compressing her airway. With Gleevec administered under a compassionate use protocol, the patient’s tumor was reduced by about 80 percent, Dr. Clapp said. The patient was subsequently removed from treatment and is being followed, he said.

Again, a word of thanks to our Lord who gifted men, even unbelieving men, with minds capable of searching out these hidden things of our earthly lives. May God grant them insight to see the hidden things of their spiritual lives and find redemption in his Son!

A pair of interesting articles showed up recently in the Scientist magazine web-site (free registration required). The two articles speak to the need for education in the history and philosophy of science. The arguments presented (and the biases revealed) make for interesting reading.

The first article is What makes science “science”? By James Williams, subtitled ‘Trainee teachers don’t have a clue, and most scientists probably don’t either. That’s bad news.’

The second article is Why the philosophy of science matters By Richard Gallagher, ‘The central tenets of science enhance communication and our influence on society’.

Here are some concerns Williams highlights in his article:

As a science educator, I train science graduates to become science teachers. Over the past two years I’ve surveyed their understanding of key terminology and my findings reveal a serious problem. Graduates, from a range of science disciplines and from a variety of universities in Britain and around the world, have a poor grasp of the meaning of simple terms and are unable to provide appropriate definitions of key scientific terminology. So how can these hopeful young trainees possibly teach science to children so that they become scientifically literate? How will school-kids learn to distinguish the questions and problems that science can answer from those that science cannot and, more importantly, the difference between science and pseudoscience?

What kind of ignorance is Williams talking about?

The results show a lack of understanding of what scientific theories and laws are. And the nature of a ‘fact’ in science was not commonly understood … Some of the graduates implicitly or explicitly equated theories with hypotheses

Gallagher makes this observation concerning Williams’ findings:

Williams’ findings demand a thorough assessment of what’s being taught to science students. If, as seems likely, university science departments are churning out technically sophisticated but intellectually stunted drones that don’t understand the underpinnings of science, then urgent reforms to the curriculum are required because such people aren’t really scientists at all.

Those students who go on to grad school will presumably be exposed to aspects of the philosophy of science, if only through engaging in research. But this is not so for the group that Williams is working with, trainee teachers.

He goes on to say this:

Williams’ calls for a core course in the history and philosophy of science to be taught to all science undergraduates strikes a chord. I’d add that a further course on the philosophy of biology should be required of students in the life and medical sciences.

And calls scientists to “get back to our guiding philosophy”.

Why are they so concerned? Well consider these lines from each man:

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Star Trek’s Dr. McCoy had a Tricorder device that was able to diagnose almost any physical condition. It may not yet appear in your doctor’s office, but NASA is working on a device that may be able to discern what’s bugging you:

“Ultimately we want to provide cartridges for all kinds of micro-organisms and chemical compounds,” says Morris. “We’d even like to be able to use our system to figure out what ‘bug’ an astronaut has if he or she becomes ill.”

Lisa Monaco, LOCAD project scientist, adds her vision of the future: “What we are developing at MSFC has use not only on the ISS, but also on lunar missions, long duration stays on other planets, and most certainly here on Earth.”

In the years ahead, as space voyages become longer and longer, it will be even more imperative to have ways of checking astronauts’ health and monitoring electronics. For the record, no astronaut has ever become seriously ill on any space mission. However, the scientists point out that if an astronaut did ever get sick, it would take too much time to send a sample back to Earth, have it tested, and receive a long-distance answer. With next-generation LOCAD technologies, detection and diagnosis would be quick, easy, and on the spot.

Dr. McCoy, here we come.

Emphasis mine.

Just one of those cool things going on at NASA.

Read the whole article for the current state of the project.

A couple of fellows from our local area found this monster from the deep blue sea washing itself up on the beach.

It’s a Pacific longnose lancetfish, usually inhabiting a depth of 1.8 km, one of God’s wonderful creations.

Read the whole story here.

Just thought that was kind of cool…

A science script consultant tells all in “My life as an advisor to  TV and film“…

In general, I’ve found that producers of comedy have less interest in adhering to the facts than those involved in dramas.

but…

Even on the dramas, however, a cherished scientific truth will sometimes have to be discarded in order to enable an essential story development, such as a normally three-week-long forensic DNA analysis that’s fictionally done in one hour for the sake of plot pacing. In truth, few will ever notice these gaffs. As one TV producer told me, the number of Ph.D. scientists watching his show accounts for no more than 0.00001% of the Nielsen rating audience.