Those "Evil"-Scientists; At It, AGAIN!!

[Mr. Shaman]

"A paralyzed Belgian man who spent the past 23 years incorrectly diagnosed as being in a vegetative state, was fully conscious and could hear everything around him the entire time.

Houbens, a one-time engineering student and martial arts enthusiast was trapped in his own world. That is, until Dr. Steven Laureys of the University of Liege, using modern brain scanning technology unavailable in the 1980s, saw that Houbens' brain lit up with near-normal functioning when he was asked a question.

Laureys discovered Houbens' state in a Belgian hospital three years ago, but the case has only just come to light after Laureys published a study in the journal, BMC Neurology earlier this year.

He argued that new imaging technology will show that many more people like Houbens, believed in a vegetative state are actually misdiagnosed."

******


Gee.....before YOU KNOW IT........

"....every time one human being kills another, the rest of us are left to wonder why."​

 

[Mr. Shaman]

"The genome is a computer's hardware, and the epigenome is the software that tells it what to do.

Epigenomes vary greatly among species, Jirtle explains, so we cannot assume that obesity in humans is preventable with prenatal vitamins. But his experiment is part of a growing body of research that has some scientists rethinking humans' genetic destinies. Is our hereditary fate -- bipolar disorder or cancer at age 70, for example -- sealed upon the formation of our double helices, or are there things we can do to change it? Are we recipients of our DNA, or caretakers of it?

Last year, the National Institutes of Health announced that it would invest $190 million to accelerate epigenetic research. The list of illnesses to be studied in the resulting grants reveals the scope of the emerging field: cancer, Alzheimer's disease, autism, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, asthma, kidney disease, glaucoma, muscular dystrophy and more."

Gee.....you can actually feel the yoke o' BUSHCO's Third World Status being LIFTED!!!!!!

​

 

[Mr. Shaman]

"It took more than four years, a double mastectomy, and multiple other surgeries—as well as radiation treatments and bad reactions to ineffective chemotherapy drugs—before Christine Hanson's breast cancer was brought under control by Dr. Mark Fesen in Hutchinson, Kan. By then, cancer had spread to her lungs, liver, and brain.

Through a port implanted in her chest nearly five years ago to reduce stress on her veins, Hanson, the mother of three children not yet in high school, has been getting weekly infusions of cancer-treatment drugs Avastin and Abraxane, which have put her cancer into remission. What if doctors had a detailed road map of the kinds of drugs and therapies that Hanson's genetic makeup makes her most receptive to, instead of having to arrive at treatments through the costly—and sometimes painful—method of trial and error?

That's the promise of the nascent field of personalized medicine, where treatment is prescribed based on an understanding how an individual's body is genetically predisposed to welcome or resist certain compounds. The day when customized treatment is widely available may soon be within reach, thanks to technological advances being made by life science tools companies. They develop and market protein-separation devices and other instruments that will eventually provide researchers with the knowledge needed to precisely target the best treatment for life-threatening illnesses.

After bureaucratic delays this year that frustrated investors, the awarding of $10 billion to the National Institutes of Health under the Obama Administration's stimulus program over the next two years is likely to give a big boost to life science companies' earnings as the money funds a fresh wave of research.

It's been less than seven years since completion of the momentous Human Genome Project, which took 13 years and an estimated $3.8 billion to map humanity's genetic material. Sequencing an individual's DNA currently costs about $50,000 and there's a road map to get it down to $1,000 within three to five years, say equity analysts who cover the industry.

Drug companies have been reluctant to embrace personalized medicine because it's easier to sell a less-targeted drug to a broader population than to market more narrowly applied drugs to smaller populations.

Although the future medical research prospects are lucrative by themselves, some analysts see a much bigger opportunity in applications across such other industries as environmental monitoring, water treatment, food safety, and forensics—all driven by stricter global regulation.

"These technologies' ability to differentiate and quantify compounds in a quick, cheap, and efficient manner makes them applicable to lots of other industries," says McCormack. "Early applications were in life sciences where the compounds in question were drugs. As we move forward, the compounds are air, water, and food, and you're trying to find the elements that don't belong or that we need to remove."

Whew!!!!!!

We might YET shed our Bush-generated Third-World-status!!!!!!!

(If we can manage to keep the "moralists"/"conservatives" isolated in their bunkers!!)
​

 

[Phoenix68]

.
AI Tool Decodes Brain Cancer’s Genome During Surgery
July 7, 2023
.​

"Scientists have designed an AI tool that can rapidly decode a brain tumor’s DNA to determine its molecular identity during surgery — critical information that under the current approach can take a few days and up to a few weeks.

Knowing a tumor’s molecular type enables neurosurgeons to make decisions such as how much brain tissue to remove and whether to place tumor-killing drugs directly into the brain — while the patient is still on the operating table."

.​