5 Facts Everyone Should Know About Cancer Research And Treatments

Cancer is one of the most complex diseases of our time. Despite the fact that modern medicine has developed effective treatments over-time, the disease still continues to hold many unanswered questions.

Cancer Research is the extensive scientific study about cancer that aims to increase the understanding of the disease. There are many areas of research, each focusing on a particular aspect of cancer. Some focus on new treatment modalities, effects of combination therapy, side-effects and also the effectivity of current treatment being utilized in today's medicine. This is the sort of research that gave rise to modern treatment modalities like chemotherapy and radiation.

Some study concentrate on the epidemiology of cancer, the causes, risks and lifestyle changes that may reduce a person's risk of developing the disease. This area of cancer research includes the research of how the environment contributes to the development of cancer. It also includes the research of genetics and just how this affects someone's susceptibility to certain kinds of cancers.

As a result of the increasing number of cancer cases, many research groups have emerged, each centering on a far more specific place of study. Several of the groups that conduct cancer research will be the Northern California Cancer Center, Lance Armstrong Foundation and Israel Cancer Research Fund to name several.

Many of these research institutes are funded privately or through donations. There have been controversies surrounding cancer research scientists studies, most notably the use of animals as study subjects. Researchers commonly use mice to study the growth of cancer cells or to check the effectivity of new treatment. Pro animal groups have criticized this practice but scientists are quick to defend their posts proclaiming that they make sure all animal subjects which are injected with cancer cells are treated.

Regardless of one's views regarding these studies, it cannot be denied that cancer research has contributed considerably to the present awareness of the disease and has produced treatment that has saved millions of lives.

"Today the boundaries between medical and biological disciplines have vanished. . . . In an anatomy department, biologists, chemists, and physicists can present the human body to medical students being an uninterrupted ascent from atoms to man: from the tens of atoms that make a small molecule, to the thousands of molecules that make a polymer (for example a protein or possibly a nucleic acid), to the millions of such polymers that make a cell, to the billions of cells that produce a tissue, and also the trillions of specialized cells that create a body. In a wider, panoramic view, the human body and its behavior becomes a tiny decoration within the tapestry of life interwoven with the incredible number of plasmids, viruses, bacteria, plants, and animals in a 4-billion-year evolutionary development." Thus observed physician and biochemist Arthur Kornberg.1 Medical students are not alone in confronting myriad levels of complexity and scales of spatial and temporal organization. Freshman biology textbooks present a similar panorama from chemical bonds between atoms to the evolution of ecological systems.

A first lesson for physics students is the vast array of scales from subatomic particles to medium-size things we handle everyday to galaxies as well as the universe itself. The expansive education is invaluable. When students later specialize in a particular place of research, they can be likely to concentrate on one or a few levels that can be more relevant than the others. The concentration comes with the risk of digging oneself into a hole and studying the sky from the bottom a well, as is expressed by ideologies asserting that all is nothing but genes or nothing but ecology. To avoid such traps is a constant struggle in scientific research. Analysis and synthesis in cancer research Think about a medical phenomenon, cancer. Which of the following do you think true? A. Cancer is essentially a genetic disease.2B. Cancer is a disorder of unregulated proliferation of abnormal cells.3C. Smoking accounts for roughly 30 percent of all cancer deaths in the nation, overweight and obesity account for 15-20 percent.4

It is F, as outlined by available scientific data, although many people reject any answer that won't conform to their pet ideology. Statements A to E describe cancer from the perspectives of distinct organizational levels: molecular, cellular, personal, familial, and environmental. An important achievement in cancer research is the introduction of a framework that accommodates phenomena in these levels and roughly explains their interrelationships. Its center of gravity lies on the molecular and cellular levels. On the other hand, its explanations of how certain viruses, chemicals, and radiations contribute to cancer suggest links to environmental and social researches on people's exposure to these carcinogens. Cancer research underscores the systematic approach that makes natural science and modern engineering so powerful. Faced with a complex phenomenon, scientists analyze or reduce it to components and simpler factors that may be investigated completely, for example analyzing cancer development into cellular dynamics and gene mutations. The fruitfulness of the reductive approach is apparent when one compares the abundant solid knowledge it yields to the empty rhetoric of mystical holism that insists all is a seamless web impervious to analysis. To analyze, on the contrary, just isn't to analyze away.

Reducing cancer to genes just isn't subscribing to a dogmatic reductionism that regards a patient as nothing but a bag of genes. Regardless of the success and glamor of genetics and molecular biology in disease research, few if any researcher would disagree with the editors of a recent segment on complex diseases in Science: "It's not simply the genes."7 Holism that reviles analysis and reductionism that reviles synthesis are both detrimental to science, by which analysis and synthesis are complementary. For scientific research, reduction of a phenomenon into elements is incomplete if not then by integration of relevant elements for the goal of explaining the original phenomenon. Socrates recommended the methods of division and collection. Galileo's methods were described as resolution and composition. Newton explained the effects of analysis and synthesis in scientific investigations. Descartes followed a similar vein and went further to combine analysis and synthesis as two steps of just one method. Perhaps the most comprehensive articulation comes from engineers. In designing complex systems such airplanes, engineers must ensure the functions of the airplane as being an integral whole and specify minute details of its ten thousand parts that must work together. To rationalize design processes, they have developed systems engineering, in which analysis and synthesis are graphically depicted as the letter "V." The downward stroke of the V represents the decomposition of a system into smaller and smaller parts as well as the upward stroke the assemblage of the parts into the system as a whole