Tag: cancer

Two Inches

~ thoughtsatlarge ~ 3 Comments

Light travels at 671 million miles per hour. The sun is 93 million miles away from the earth. That means that if the sun exploded, we would not see it for 8 minutes and 19 seconds. A light year is the distance that light can travel in one earth year. This equates to 5,878,625 million miles, or roughly 6 quadrillion miles. The universe is estimated at about 93 billion light years across. How insignificant do you feel?

An electron is less than 1/1000 the diameter of a proton. A proton has a diameter of approximately 1/25,000,000,000,000 inch. Consider that there are about 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 electrons in the average human body. How colossal do you feel?

Cancer is the unchecked growth of mutated cells in an organism. Once established and supplied with their own blood source, these neoplasms or tumors replicate out of control. It typically takes 1,000,000,000 cancer cells in a tumor for it to be detectable using physical examination or conventional radiology.

It is against that backdrop that we humans can feel like the center of the universe in one breath and like cosmic dust in the next. We can feel like masters of our own dominion on the inhale and poker chips in a biological warfare game on the exhale. We spend our lives pushing against both our physical and mental limitations, shaping the imaginary form of what we can control in an effort to appreciate our daily lives and mollify our aspirations of significance, if not eternal life through posterity.

We all begin life believing we are the most important creature on earth. Over time, we struggle to accept that we must share this public stage; that the applause we hear is only ours to share. Eventually, we realize that the mark we make on the world is ours to carve and that we may use no tools save those of our own intelligence. We claw with our fingernails at an indifferent earth, paying the price of birth, baring the scars of experience (the blood-stained reminders of our successes and the rescued wisdom gleaned from our defeats) before giving way to those behind us. Life is a disorderly queue and each surviving generation steps ever forward to take the place of those who have gone before us.

And yet, with all of the collective knowledge humanity has amassed, cancer , biology and the march of time relentlessly cuts us down with concern for neither our individual accomplishments nor mankind’s self-appointed importance. None of which prevents us from fighting it. We bargain, promise, diet, pray, in essence, delude ourselves into thinking that chemistry, physics and biology are somehow under the purview of our control. Nowhere is this more evident than when disease or chance affects those we love the most. A willing suspension of belief absorbs us; we somehow seek mystical ways of trading places with our afflicted loved ones, to take the proverbial bullet on their behalf, ignoring the axiomatic in favor of the absurd.

It is this hopeless sensation that I feel when embracing my wife, whose cancerous tumors lay two inches below the skin’s surface, bent on their suicidal quest to metastasize beyond her lungs. Were I able, in that enveloping hug, I would pull the cancer out of her lungs through her back and into my fingertips, freeing her of the daily pain and altered future demanded of her illness. Willingly, I would cut off my hand, burn the cancerous appendage and celebrate the event in song and dance if it would help my wife.  All for the sake of two inches. How long would it take light to travel those two inches? How many electrons, were they capable of being paused and lined up, would it take to traverse those two inches? For the sake of those two inches, I am helpless.  Two inches.

Moon Shots

~ thoughtsatlarge ~ 1 Comment

ImageIn the third season of The West Wing, at the end of the episode titled “100,000 Airplanes,” Deputy White House Communications Director Sam Seaborne deletes from his computer the following passage from a final draft of President Bartlet’s upcoming State of the Union speech:

“Over the past half-century, we’ve split the atom, we’ve spliced the gene, and we’ve roamed Tranquility Base. We’ve reached for the stars, and never have we been closer to having them in our grasp. New science, new technology is making the difference between life and death, and so we need a national commitment equal to this unparalleled moment of possibility. And so, I announce to you tonight, that I will bring the full resources of the federal government and the full reach of my office to this fundamental goal: we will cure cancer by the end of this decade.”

Politics prevented the fictional president from making this statement.  I would submit that politics has prevented every actual president from making this proclamation as well.  However, it is the private sector (coupled with federal initiatives) that rises to meet this monumental challenge.  Through the tireless efforts of countless researchers over the past few decades, major advances have occurred in the fight against cancer.  This past Sunday (September 23, 2012) Nature published an article identifying four definitive types of breast cancer following a comprehensive genetic study.  This study is part of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA).  Funded as a pilot program in 2006 with a $50 million investment from both the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), the TCGA pilot project concluded that a compendium of DNA “errors” could be categorized for specific cancer types. The National Institutes of Health has committed $175 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) to continue the program.

Four days earlier, on Wednesday, September 19th, the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center launched its Moon Shots program designed to “accelerate the pace of converting scientific discoveries into clinical advances that reduce cancer deaths.”  The cost of the Moon Shots Program will be an estimated $3 billion in the first 10 years. It will be funded through M.D. Anderson institutional earnings, philanthropic donations, research grants and earnings gained from new discoveries.

Cancer knows no boundaries, takes no prisoners and ensures its own destruction by ultimately killing its host.  War against such an enemy can likewise know no mercy.  ImagePresident Kennedy, in his famous speech at Rice University on September 12, 1962 wherein he committed the United States to reach the moon by the end of the decade said, “William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage.”  Let neither great difficulties, nor politics dissuade us from reaching this “moon.”