Here s What I Know About Cancer Research And Treatments
Cancer is just one of the most complex diseases of our time. Even though 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 knowledge of the disease. There are numerous areas of research, each concentrating on a particular element of cancer. Some concentrate 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 is the kind 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 may reduce someone's risk of developing the disease. This area of cancer research includes the study of how the environment contributes to the development of cancer. It also includes the study of genetics and just how this affects an individual's susceptibility to certain kinds of cancers.
Because of the increasing number of cancer cases, many research groups have emerged, each focusing on a more specific place of study. Some of the groups that conduct cancer research are 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 utilization 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 ensure all animal subjects that can be injected with cancer cells are treated.
In spite of one's views regarding these studies, there is no denying that cancer studies have contributed substantially 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 body system to medical students being an uninterrupted ascent from atoms to man: from the tens of atoms which make a small molecule, to the thousands of molecules which make a polymer (for example a protein or a nucleic acid), to the millions of such polymers that make a cell, to the billions of cells that make a tissue, as well as the trillions of specialized cells that create a body. In a wider, panoramic view, the human body and it is behavior becomes a tiny decoration in the tapestry of life interwoven with the incredible selection 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 selection of scales from the sarscoviki.app.vanderbilt.edu blog subatomic particles to medium-size things we handle everyday to galaxies and also the universe itself. The expansive education is invaluable. When students later specialize in a particular area of research, they are likely to concentrate on one or possibly a few levels that will 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 Consider a medical phenomenon, cancer. Which of the next 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 thirty percent of all cancer deaths in the united states, overweight and obesity account for 15-20 percent.4
It's F, as outlined by available scientific data, although some individuals reject any answer that doesn'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 can be investigated thoroughly, 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 flip side, isn't to analyze away.
Reducing cancer to genes is not 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, in 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 an individual method. Perhaps 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, through 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 and also the upward stroke the assemblage of the parts in to the system as a whole
