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October 14, 2005
Laura Ingraham - Best Wishes at End-of-Treatment
Best wishes to Laura Ingraham at the completion of over six months of cancer therapy. Wednesday was Laura's last radiation treatment. The hope is that all the cancer cells were killed and they won't come back. Over the next few months, the healthy cells killed by the treatment (including hair-follicle cells on the scalp) will begin to recover. The risks at this point are two-fold: that there is still some malignancy and the cancer will come back, or that her heart was damaged by the radiation. Every precaution has been taken to prevent these possibilities, and Laura is in exceptional good health, so there is every reason to hope for the best.
We are learning more about cancer all the time, to the point that people diagnosed with the disease no longer feel it's a death sentence. Molecular biology offers some hope here. Recent results suggest that oxidants contribute to cancer, and therefore anti-oxidant vitamins (mostly B and C) can help keep it at bay. (This came as quite a shock to Bruce, who vividly remembers the controversy surrounding Linus Pauling's prescription of vitamin C as a cure for cancer.) We've also learned about the role of telomeres in cancer. Eukaryotic cells (that is, cells with a nucleus), have strands of DNA instead of the rings used in the simpler prokaryotic life forms. The telomeres act as a sort of stop sign on the DNA replication process (something you don't need with the rings). This process complicates cloning; in addition, damage to telomeres may cause cancer and other aging effects. Unfortunately, we are still unsure about a lot of things regarding eukaryotes, except that if they were intelligently designed, the designer had a strange sense of humor.
In any case, the important thing is that we have hope, and hopefully Laura will continue to provide us with her offbeat political analysis for a long time to come.
Respectfully submitted,
Ferdinand T. Cat
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Posted by: Lisa at October 14, 2005 3:34 PM
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