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So why ignore the obvious? If American healthcare is so broken, why are cancer survival rates almost uniformly higher (and usually by a good %) than in Europe? Look it up, the data is there.

The references I see, don't obviosly say that: US mortality rate of 27 out of 135 ... vs. UK survival rate of 80% for breast cancer in the 1998-2001 period. Which is identical.

Not that I'd total trust the above stats. either way. For instance I'm not sure that the stats. are calculated in the same way ... it doesn't account for either country not diagnosing the cancer etc. What you really want is total number of people dying, or being sick, say (oh, wait ... that's what the article was about).

Did someone say traces of balls?!
http://training.seer.cancer.gov/ss_module11_testis /images/illu_testis_schematic.jpg

So, how big a deal is that increased cancer risk from cosmic rays, really?

nanocancer has it's own government website.

I believe in this more than virus gene therapy.

You can't let the immune system interfere!

Good stuff. I keep up to date on this .

And I want to develop a drug that cures cancer. Who's going to fund it? You? Obviously not? Government? Do you really want the government getting into the drug making business?

Yes I do. I really really do.

Sera

And I want to develop a drug that cures cancer. Who's going to fund it? You? Obviously not? Government? Do you really want the government getting into the drug making business?

Yes I do. I really really do.

Sera

Brain/ONS cancer incidence rates in the US dropped by 0.9% from 1997 to 2001.

Umm ... because we already are

http://www3.cancer.gov/public/factbk97/varican.htm

I'm also pretty certain that we get diminishing returns from putting more money into cancer research, as there are a relatively limited number of qualified people to which we can apply those monies. Therefore, the two efforts are not by any means mutually exclusive and we should do both (and are).

For some light reading in terms most people can actually understand, try this site. For a more technical summary, try here.

InnerWeb

Wikipedia, NIDA, the National Cancer Institute, American Society of Addiction Medicine, and the Merck Manual all seem to like my assessment of the term as deprecated.

Get over it, the term is obsolete.

Read the history of this shot:CASTLE-BRAVO

Apparently the bomb designers miscalculated something. The yield was supposed to be about 5 megatons. Turned out to be closer to 15. (Miscalculated!) The fallout irradiated other islanders and a fishing boat that were supposed to be safe. I'd say this event qualifies as one of the biggest engineering f-ups in history.

Here's an interesting animation about fallout from the Nevada tests. Guess it's for people who don't like to read.

Asbestos exposure leads to Mesothelioma usually. Small cell lung cancer has been long suspected as being a direct result of cigarette smoking, but asbestos is also a possibility.

Non- or minimally invasive assays are definitely needed for early detection and customized treatment for the many different types of cancer. I used to work (and still hold shares) for a biotech startup using a mouse retrovirus system as a functional screen for discovering genes related to cancer. The company, Sagres Discovery, quickly found over a thousand oncogene targets. A public collaboration using the same technology is being led by Neal Copeland at the National Cancer Institute.

I am very encouraged by these efforts and hope that this kind of content can be combined with highly parallel microfluidic tests (lots of tiny reactions) to build comprehensive diagnostic tests .

In other words, the death rate from the common cold is 0.6/1000, or a little more than 7% of total worldwide deaths.
You can't really believe that, can you? 1 in 14 people die of a cold? For comparison, cancer killed about 1.6/1000 (1988). Heart disease , about 1.9/1000. Do you really believe that cancer and CVD kill only 3x as many people as the cold each of us gets every year?

This is the graph for 20-54 year olds. It shows an increase as well.

Milloy noted that despite all the chemicals, the overall U.S. population is living longer and healthier.

I guess that's why the rate of cancer has dramatically increased in the last 30 years. It's interesting that it started to decline in 1991. I wonder what happened then???

The part of the reovirus treatment that's effective is that mutations in the ras pathway occur in a third of tumor types, most notably large percentages of pancreatic, lung, sporadic colorectal, and myleoid leukemia cancers. If you look at the numbers these four types account for more than half the expected cancer deaths in the united states for 2003.

Granted, the actual number of cases the treatment will be effective against is less than that, but it's far more effective that chemo, and infinitely less damaging to the patient. I would say targeting the ras pathway is a little better than "fine."

Unfortunately, research shows just that: smokers compensate for reductions in nicotine content by increasing the number of cigarettes they smoke. That's one of the main reasons the National Cancer Institute thought "light" cigarettes may actually be increasing lung cancer rates.

Admittedly, the monograph focuses on low tar and nicotine, not nicotine-free cigarettes, but the same logic applies.

This could easily explain the huge upswing in cancer over the last 40 years, as low-level radiation exposure has steadily increased.

Compare the tables for 1950-1969 and 1970-1994:
1970-94

1950-1969

These are age-adjusted rates, of course, since older people get more cancers.

This could easily explain the huge upswing in cancer over the last 40 years, as low-level radiation exposure has steadily increased.

Compare the tables for 1950-1969 and 1970-1994:
1970-94

1950-1969

These are age-adjusted rates, of course, since older people get more cancers.

yes encryption IS a good thing for people like NIST to put resources into. You need people at the top of the field, and it helps that the organization's interests fall right in line with having an open, secure encryption system.

Sandia researchers develop world's fastest encryptor

ORNL Helps Develop Electronic Notebooks (read article to see crypto stuff)

GRIP -- Gigabit Rate IPSec (Army)

Cancer research (I never knew cancer genes needed encryption)

WING (DARPA)

NASA (why can't they look to NIST?)

Key Agile ATM (DARPA)

And theres a slew more. I agree that government should promote better standards, but instead of spending X millions on a bunch of bs, they should look to consolidate it all, which is what my main post should've stated I guess. Some of this so called research, or development never even sees the light of day due to timing situations. One part of government may intend to develop and deploy something, but it won't always happen, meaning all that money used for those projects are now gone, and they're left to ask for more money for some new project, never using their own resources to see if another agency can assist them.