December 2020 Archives
A final fall on campus | MIT Technology Review
MIT seniors were granted three months on campus this fall, but they will spend the spring semester studying remotely. Alex Meredith '21 describes his time: "When weeks quarantining at home with my parents and younger brothers stretched into months, all I wanted was one last chance to see my friends in person, to say goodbye from six feet apart before we graduated and scattered across the country and the world for good. My time on campus this year may be short, but I'm incredibly glad that I got my chance. Moreover, the limits on this time have given me a strong sense of clarity--I can't turn down an invitation to lunch when there are so few lunches left."
Betrayal: Jean Shepherd and "A Christmas Story" - Los Angeles Review of Books
The five Jean Shepherd stories that were woven together in A Christmas Story with softer edges. "Among other things, Shepherd's tales are about the role of mass communications and consumerism in American life. Critics warned then, in the 1950s and early '60s, much as they do now, that media is controlling us like a puppet master, leading us to think and desire things we do not intend. Nonsense, says Shepherd: Our most profound urges come from within."
"Scientists from Memorial Sloan Kettering and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have published a pioneering, cross-cancer analysis of changes in metabolism that occur during cancer progression. The [Pan-Cancer Metabolism Data Explorer] database they created will help researchers who wish to test hypotheses about how metabolic changes fuel cancer growth. The resource is being made available publicly online.
"Based on the analysis of more than 900 tumor samples across seven different types of cancer, the resulting collection is the largest of its kind and sets a benchmark for future research. A paper describing the results appears today in the journal Cell Systems.
"According to MSK computational biologist Ed Reznik, one of the paper's corresponding authors, the road map does for metabolism what genome-wide genetic studies have done for the search for cancer-related genes."
Related article: After Years of Neglect, Cancer Biologists Return to a Forgotten Field: Metabolism:
"This raised the question of what purpose Warburg metabolism [abnormally converting glucose to lactate] serves in cancer cells. Dr. Thompson's proposal, which he first laid out in 2008, is that Warburg metabolism provides the necessary building blocks for cancer cells to divide uncontrollably. This idea runs counter to a century of work on cancer metabolism, but it's proving to be a productive framework for research.
"What causes metabolism to go haywire in the first place? An important clue came in 2004, when Dr. Thompson discovered that mutations in a gene called AKT -- which is commonly mutated in cancer -- allows cells to take up glucose without restraint. This suggested to Dr. Thompson that what cancer-causing oncogenes do, fundamentally, is alter metabolism in ways that set cells down the path to cancer."
Jane McLelland, a Stage IV cancer survivor, has written extensively, in How to Starve Cancer, about the off-label use of well-known medications to block metabolic pathways for specific cancers.
