Every scientist is a kid in the purest way. Science has the potential to amaze, transform and inspire the way every single person on earth thinks of the world and themselves. The parallel between children and science is simple: every kid always wants to know the “whys” of things. When I was a kid, I remember being very curious about everything. I wanted to know every detail on the world surrounding my family and me. This characteristic even drove my mother crazy since she used to call me the boy of the “whys”; but it was the indication that I wanted to be a real scientist. This feeling got even deeper when in high school I had a biology teacher that gave classes on genetics and Mendel’s law. That was the moment I knew I wanted to work with genetics! And why am I writing about this curiosity that was always haunting me? Well, science is cool because we can try (at least…) to understand the “whys”. The instinct of curiosity is inside every kid, shy or outgoing, because children is always asking about the stuff around them. Kids in secondary school routinely carry out scientific experiments for classes and science fairs. However, the “discoveries” and/or “inventions” presented by them are never published; except for the kids from a group of British schoolchildren that might be the youngest “scientists” ever to have their work published in a peer-reviewed journal. The article was published in Biology Letters, and is authored by twenty-five 8- to 10-year-old children from Blackawton Primary School. These kids reported that buff-tailed bumblebees can learn to recognize nourishing flowers based on colors and patterns (see their article “Blackawton bees” here). The kids from this school asked the questions, hypothesized the answers, designed “games” to test it (which corresponded to the experiments), analyzed the data and wrote the article in “kids language”. Of course all of this had adult supervision by the British scientist Beau Lotto and teachers from the Blackawton Primary School (see more information in the article “Schoolchildren announce bumble-bee breakthrough in top science journal” from The Guardian). Using simple puzzles to direct bees to colors having sugar or salt, the kids discovered that bumblebees can use a combination of color and spatial relationships to decide which flowers they are directed to; this indicates that bees can indeed “memorize” information. In real life this might mean that bees are able to collect information and remember it when going to different fields in nature. The article was featured in a TED Talk by Lotto and one of the students named Amy O’Toole (all twenty-five kids were authors of the article) and also in a Featured Editor’s Choice from the prestigious Science Magazine. In addition, there was a special comment about their article in the journal that it was published and discussions about it in the scientific community all over the world. After this breakthrough (I mean the first kids publishing their discoveries in a peer-reviewed journal), it is a fact that the students of Blackawton Primary School are very lucky because they have had an educational experience which, sadly, most school science students never get to have (and I myself didn’t). They carried out a genuinely original piece of work and published it, or in other words, they went through all the scientific process from discovery to publication (it is worth to note that it took almost 2 years from the time of writing to the acceptance and publication of the article!). The kids also wrote in their article a conclusion that every scientist has come to at one point in their career: “Science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before”. Well, I wanted to describe this exceptional example about the kids from Blackawton Primary School to show that every scientist is like children – we want to know the answers to the “whys” in the world surrounding us. It does not mean it is an easy job, but that is why we love what we do!
Cancer – many diseases in one?
Monday, November 18th, 2013Cancer is a disease of the cells. The body is made up of a community of individual cells, each of which has a specific job to ensure that the community functions correctly. Liver cells must detoxify the fluids of the body, lung cells must exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide from the blood, and skin cells must separate the outside world from the inside of our body. In addition to performing their assigned jobs, cells are also good citizens. Cells respect the space of the other cells around them and support the healthiness of those cells. Occasionally, cells begin to grow in an uncontrolled fashion, causing many problems for the body. Cancer is a disease of uncontrolled cell growth or proliferation. Cancer cells are no longer good citizens. For instance, a liver cell that becomes cancerous no longer does its job of detoxifying the body. In addition, cancer cells do not respect their neighboring cells and will crowd them out of existence. We always had this concept that is still used in pathology today that each cancer type refers to the tissue and cell type of origin. In that case, breast cancers would emerge from the breast cells and have their original characteristics. It turns out that cancer is a combination of many different diseases in one. Cancer is not a single disease, but literally hundreds of different diseases. This is of great practical importance to both physicians and patients, because different cancers have to be treated differently having different outcomes for the patients. In this regard, recent studies have shown that we should classify and also treat tumors mainly based on the mutations that they carry other than the tissue of origin (see more in the article “Mutational landscape and significance across 12 major cancer types” by Kandoth et al. on Nature). Multiple genes are defective in cancers. Cancer does not occur from a single gene mutation in a single gene. Instead, the development of cancer involves multiple mutations within several key genes, including mutations in proto-oncogenes, tumor suppressor genes, DNA repair genes, etc. Researchers recently pointed out that we should start treating tumors based on their genetic and genomic profiles and landscape. These findings lay the groundwork for the development of personalized therapies. In addition, it is clear that pathways of genes should be the focus of treatment (see the comment “Herceptin pioneer’s life science innovation: Cancer pathways should be treatment focus” at MedCity News). These pathways of genes represent the driver defects that could be the cause of the disease, thus providing windows of opportunity in therapeutics (see more in the article “Comprehensive identification of mutational cancer driver genes across 12 tumor types” by Tamborero et al. on Nature). In the future, cancer will be a chronic disease controlled by an array of medicines each targeting a defective pathway of that specific tumor. Cancers will soon be classified based on their genetic profiles instead of the tissue of origin. Drug companies are already starting to adapt to this trend and new cocktails of more targeted therapies are on the horizon (Image Source: FOX News).
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