The Basic Facts Of Cancer Research Scientists
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 will be the extensive scientific study about cancer that aims to increase the knowledge of the disease. There are plenty of areas of research, each focusing on a particular facet of cancer. Some focus on new treatment modalities, effects of combination therapy, side-effects as well as the effectivity of current treatment being utilized in today's medicine. This really is the sort of research that gave rise to modern treatment modalities like chemotherapy and radiation.
Some research concentrate on the epidemiology of cancer, the causes, risks and lifestyle changes that will reduce someone's risk of developing the disease. This place of cancer research includes the study of how the environment contributes to the creation of cancer. It also includes the research of genetics and the way this affects a person's susceptibility to certain kinds of cancers.
Because of the increasing number of cancer cases, many research groups have emerged, each focusing on a far more specific place of study. Several of the groups that conduct cancer research are the Northern California Cancer Center, Lance Armstrong Foundation and Israel Cancer Research Fund to name a number of.
Many of these research institutes are funded privately or through donations. There happen to be controversies surrounding cancer studies, most notably the utilization of animals as study subjects. Researchers commonly use mice to study the growth of cancer cells or to look into the effectivity of new treatment. Pro animal groups have criticized this practice but scientists are quick to defend their posts saying that they ensure all animal subjects that will be injected with cancer cells are treated.
Irrespective of one's views regarding these studies, it is true that cancer research has contributed considerably to the present awareness of the disease and it has produced treatment which 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 as being an uninterrupted ascent from atoms to man: from the tens of atoms which make a small molecule, to the thousands of molecules that make a polymer (such as a protein or a nucleic acid), to the millions of such polymers that make a cell, to the billions of cells which make a tissue, as well as the trillions of specialized cells that create a body. In a wider, panoramic view publisher site, 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 will be the vast variety of scales from subatomic particles to medium-size things we handle everyday to galaxies and the universe itself. The expansive education is invaluable. When students later focus on a particular area of research, they're prone to focus on one or perhaps a few levels which are 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 prevent such traps is a constant struggle in scientific research. Analysis and synthesis in cancer research Consider 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, based on available scientific data, although some individuals reject any answer that will not conform to their pet ideology. Statements A to E describe cancer from the perspectives of different organizational levels: molecular, cellular, personal, familial, and environmental. A serious 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. Nonetheless, 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 will be investigated thoroughly, 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, in contrast, just isn't to analyze away.
Reducing cancer to genes 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 only 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 a single method. Probably the most comprehensive articulation comes from engineers. In designing complex systems such airplanes, engineers must ensure the functions of the airplane 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
