Lessons On Future Cancer Research
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 understanding of the disease. There are many areas of research, each concentrating on a particular aspect of cancer. Some focus on new treatment modalities, effects of combination therapy, side effects as well as the effectivity of current treatment being used in today's medicine. This 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, risk factors and lifestyle changes that will reduce an individual's risk of developing the disease. This area of cancer research includes the study of how the environment contributes to the creation of cancer. Additionally, it includes the research of genetics and how this affects a person's susceptibility to certain types of cancers.
Because of the increasing range of cancer cases, many research groups have emerged, each centering on a more specific area of study. Some 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.
These types of research institutes are funded privately or through donations. There happen to be controversies surrounding cancer 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 saying that they make sure all animal subjects which are injected with cancer cells are treated.
Regardless of one's views regarding these studies, it is true that cancer research has contributed significantly 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. . . . Within an anatomy department, biologists, chemists, and physicists can present the 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 produce a polymer (for example a protein or perhaps a nucleic acid), to the millions of such polymers that produce 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, the body and it is behavior becomes a tiny decoration in 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 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 concentrate on a particular area of research, they may be prone to concentrate on one or possibly a few levels which are more relevant than the others. The concentration comes with the risk of digging oneself in to 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 within the usa, overweight and obesity account for 15-20 percent.4
It is F, according to available scientific data, although a lot of people reject any answer that does 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 significant 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. Nevertheless, 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 can be investigated completely, as an 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 other hand, 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 just 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 as an integral whole and specify minute details of its ten thousand parts that must work together. To rationalize design processes, they said have developed systems engineering, by 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 in to the system as a whole
