Recently in Science Category

This is not a time to get weepy or maudlin about Sen. Kennedy. He really has just begun to fight. I know what I'm talking about.

Five years ago, in the earliest hours of Palm Sunday morning, a doctor informed me that I had a malignant brain tumor. When I asked him how much time I had he said maybe weeks or months... with luck and drugs, maybe longer.

Yesterday I bought a Trek bike and rode it to and from my office. And in the five years since, I've had two children, spent time on the professional bass fishing tour, wrote a book, and am now helping start a company.

I have also gone through 18 rounds of chemo, adjusted to a life with occasional very mild seizures - I even had one once while testifying before a congressional committee and no one noticed - and been forced to live with the reality of my mortality knowing that things could change very quickly.

Our cases are obviously different. I'm younger, I'm taller, I'm half Asian, I'm a descendent of Jefferson Davis, I'm a sushi lover, I'm a lemon meringue pie eater. Perhaps one of those things makes the remnant tumor in my head less likely to occur. Perhaps not. The point is that each of our cases is unique. We know very, very little about gliomas, very little about the brain in fact. But we do know that Senator Kennedy has just begun this fight and what he needs are our prayers and great medical resources. We know that he has the latter - though I hope that one of the resources is Howard Fine, head of neuro-oncology at the National Institutes of Health - and we must give him the former as well.

Day one in Uganda and we're visiting one of Compassion International's church partner sites. We are outside touring the new toilet facilities they have constructed and I notice a shadow moving towards me. The shadow is, oh, huge. The shadow is bigger than I am; it is a lot bigger than I am. Just as my brain processes all of this and thinks to look up to see what, exactly, is causing this massive shadow I get buzzed by a pterodactyl.

You might think I'm exaggerating, telling a fish story. I'm not!

Down here the birds go by a different name - they are called Marabou Storks. They have a wingspan of 10 feet and they think they are pigeons. They are all over downtown Kampala, they are all over everywhere. I'm actually having breakfast with one right now. He said his name is Earl.

Ok, I exaggerate slightly... but not about the size of the bird and how prevalent they are and how very much like pigeons they behave. Ok, that's all.

Say goodbye Earl.

Goodbye Earl.

Important and fascinating story in today's New York Times about a new theory in cancer treatment - a theory about to be tested in humans:

Within the next few months, researchers at three medical centers expect to start the first test in patients of one of the most promising — and contentious — ideas about the cause and treatment of cancer.

The idea is to take aim at what some scientists say are cancerous stem cells — aberrant cells that maintain and propagate malignant tumors.

Although many scientists have assumed that cancer cells are immortal — that they divide and grow indefinitely — most can only divide a certain number of times before dying. The stem-cell hypothesis says that cancers themselves may not die because they are fed by cancerous stem cells, a small and particularly dangerous kind of cell that can renew by dividing even as it spews out more cells that form the bulk of a tumor. Worse, stem cells may be impervious to most standard cancer therapies.

Not everyone accepts the hypothesis of cancerous stem cells. Skeptics say proponents are so in love with the idea that they dismiss or ignore evidence against it. Dr. Scott E. Kern, for instance, a leading pancreatic cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins University, said the hypothesis was more akin to religion than to science.

At stake in the debate is the direction of cancer research. If proponents of the stem-cell hypothesis are correct, it will usher in an era of hope for curing once-incurable cancers.

There have been too many false hopes on the cancer front for too many years. But one day one of these hopes will become reality and what a day that will be.

I missed this yesterday and perhaps everyone has already seen it, but this made my jaw drop for several reasons. First, that scientists were able to put the pieces together to make this conclusion. That is just staggering to me. Second, so much horror came from that single source is more than I can comprehend. I've known, as we all have, about a 'patient zero' but somehow this news makes it that much more... horrifying.

The AIDS virus invaded the United States in about 1969 from Haiti, carried most likely by a single infected immigrant who set the stage for it to sweep the world in a tragic epidemic, scientists said on Monday.

Michael Worobey, a University of Arizona evolutionary biologist, said the 1969 U.S. entry date is earlier than some experts had believed.

The timeline laid out in the study led by Worobey indicates that HIV infections were occurring in the United States for roughly 12 years before AIDS was first recognized by scientists as a disease in 1981. Many people had died by that point.

"It is somehow chilling to know it was probably circulating for so long under our noses," Worobey said in a telephone interview.

The researchers conducted a genetic analysis of stored blood samples from early AIDS patients to determine when the human immunodeficiency virus first entered the United States.

They found that HIV was brought to Haiti by an infected person from central Africa in about 1966, which matches earlier estimates, and then came to the United States in about 1969.

The researchers think an unknown single infected Haitian immigrant arrived in a large city like Miami or New York, and the virus circulated for years -- first in the U.S. population and then to other nations.

In today's Wall Street Journal, a fascinating piece by a long-time, pro-environment scientist who does not deny the reality of global warming but rather tries to put in perspective... in hopes that we don't forget to take care of things like forests.

The climate modelers who developed the computer programs that are being used to forecast climate change used to readily admit that the models were crude and not very realistic, but were the best that could be done with available computers and programming methods. They said our options were to either believe those crude models or believe the opinions of experienced, data-focused scientists. Having done a great deal of computer modeling myself, I appreciated their acknowledgment of the limits of their methods. But I hear no such statements today. Oddly, the forecasts of computer models have become our new reality, while facts such as the few extinctions of the past 2.5 million years are pushed aside, as if they were not our reality.

A recent article in the well-respected journal American Scientist explained why the glacier on Mt. Kilimanjaro could not be melting from global warming. Simply from an intellectual point of view it was fascinating--especially the author's Sherlock Holmes approach to figuring out what was causing the glacier to melt. That it couldn't be global warming directly (i.e., the result of air around the glacier warming) was made clear by the fact that the air temperature at the altitude of the glacier is below freezing. This means that only direct radiant heat from sunlight could be warming and melting the glacier. The author also studied the shape of the glacier and deduced that its melting pattern was consistent with radiant heat but not air temperature. Although acknowledged by many scientists, the paper is scorned by the true believers in global warming.

An interesting article in Christianity Today on famed physicist Stephen Hawking and his dance with God. Hawking is a major public intellectual, a leading scientist with a flair for popular exposition and a platform from which to explain science to...

An evolution bombshell is going off right now. Since it is an "evolution bombshell" that means it is exploding very slowly and deliberately through the pages of academic journals and the press. The bottom line is that the iconic theory...