White Sox Win!

It couldn't have been a nicer day for a game-- sunny and warm but not too hot. The whole lab went to the Cell to see the White Sox play the Texas Rangers, taking the afternoon off to enjoy the splendor of MLB on a mid-summer's day. Kristine organized the outing, bought the tickets and made all the arrangements for the 12 of us. We massed in the lab at 11:30 and took the El en masse to 35th and the Dan Ryan, to the home of the Chicago White Sox. Ryder had two pals along, Sam and Tiger so we had great hope that the fireworks would not perturb him. We found our seats on the 5th level-- nose bleed seats, down the 1st base line near the foul pole- great seats with a perfect view of all the action. Truly, there isn't a bad seat in the house. Our first test came just after the singing of the national anthem when the sky exploded with sky rockets-- and Ryder stood cheering and clapping his hands wildly over his head! It almost brought tears to my eyes seeing his enjoyment, instead of seeing him with his hands pressed over his ears and that look of abject terror. His near pathological fear of loud noises, especially fireworks has plagued him-- and us. You never know when you might encounter fireworks, at most major league sporting events is one place for sure. And there were plenty of fireworks at the game. Especially in the 8th inning when the Sox came from behind to score six runs. It was Carlos Quentin's 3 run homer that set off the fireworks. Thome had a solo homer in the first inning too, and during all of these displays Ryder soldiered through, barely affected by the booming explosions which were very near our end of the stadium. A huge breakthrough. And for the girls in the lab too-- die hard Cubs fans, they all seemed to enjoy going to the south side and seeing the Chi-Sox kick some Texas booty. The big gun, Josh Hamilton struck out 4 times and popped up to end the game. It is always a pleasure to see a team from Texas get their butts kicked, especially one formerly owned by the worst president in the history of world, one whose days are numbered-- thank goodness! I do not believe he will return to his failed career as an owner after his failure as president. In fact, other than getting elected, he's failed at every thing. Notice the price of gas recently?

and the road goes on forever...

A glorious mid-summer day with perfect sunshine, low humidity and not a cloud in the sky. The wind is blowing off the lake bringing the temperature down to the mid-seventies in the afternoon, still quite brisk this morning. I had a great ride in. I was about two minutes behind my riding buddy so I chained up to the big sprocket on front and cranked. By the time I caught her 2 miles later I had been cruising along at over 20 mph and huffing. It was good to catch my breath when we joined up. The rest of the ride was very pleasant, always nice to have company, especially if you can still cruise along at a decent pace. The group dynamic suffers from slow riders pulling back the pack, but we are tuned into a very nice 16-18 mph pace, getting me to work before the electronic lock opens the door. Just as I clicked out of my peddle the door clicked open, 27 minutes from Austin to the College of Medicine West. My homies let me know how close I was getting to my partner. At Laramie, the newspaper man told me that the lady said I would be trying to catch her, sure enough, he was right. At Kostner the euphonious one chimed out "ice-screammmmm" then let me know "lady ice-cream" was just ahead. As I rounded the corner back on to Harrison south of the Ike, there she was, 2 blocks ahead. It was a good sprint to catch up before the light at Pulaski changed.

As I ride through the hood on my way to and from work, I alway see the same folks, always in the same place, doing the same thing-- year after year. We all seem to disappear in the winter, but during the warmer months, there they are. The constant welder, the guy with the world's best work ethic at Latham industries, always at work always giving us the fist up salute as we cruise past. And the folks sitting on their front stoop in the evening as I ride home. I was struck by the realization that those 6 or 8 people, ranging in age from small children playing in the postage stamp front yard, to the old woman sitting on steps-- possibly 5 generations of the same family, all must live in that brownstone two story home. What struck me was knowing that this is what they have to look forward to. Nice and cool on the porch, watching the world go by. Day after day, year after year, this is their neighborhood, their world, their reality-- their future. No plans for leaving, just dreams of it. As their path stretches out forever before them, I rejoice in the certain knowledge that my path is about to change. Not the path of my life or my beliefs, this is THE PATH, the way, but my surroundings, my environment, my reality. My new bike ride to work will be on country roads up and down the hills of southern Illinois. Evenings spent on the wrap around porch looking out on the the fields and ponds and forests of my own property. Taking dog walks on my own land. Our neighbors not feet from our door, but hundreds of yards away. We'll hear birds singing, not the neighbor singing in the shower in the morning. The sirens screaming by will be the mythical creatures of Odysseus, not the cops on Harlem running down speeders. As I look to the future, I can only use my imagination to see what my surroundings offer, instead of knowing that just past Cicero heading west on Harrison there is a pot hole just past the bus shelter that I have to go around every day.

Bastille Daze

My favorite month is July and today is the perfect July day, low humidity, bright sun and clear blue sky. Alas, I am at work enjoying this lovely day from the other side of the computer screen. Today the French celebrate the revolution and I celebrate my birthday. Double-nickles, half way to 110. I was starting to feel old, promoted to professor and having reached the top rung of the academic ladder all I could envision was no prospects other than more of the same. Then the incredible opportunity came along and my path changed course, now leading me to a new academic challenge-- chairman. Now I feel young! A young chair with many fruitful years in my career ahead of me to devote to building the department. Now my efforts won't be micromanaged and unappreciated, and I can give my heart and soul to the job and it will be my department I am doing this for. I am energized and excited. I can hardly wait to assume the helm and take the reins. And move to Carbondale. So much to do to get ready yet it seems like such a long time to wait.

When I was on the treadmill last week, preparing for my OCCAM lecture at the NCI, I was in a bit of a funk not happy with the few pounds I've gained during the course of all my travels, and all the distraction of travel and pending moves, have gotten me off track with my day to day work. As if an electric current suddenly was connected to the treadmill, I felt this buzz begin in my feet and the vibrations traveled like a jolt of lightening through my body and out of my head-- with goose bumps and chills the epiphany came to me--BEGIN WHERE YOU ARE.

yes, of course, it always takes work, we are never there-- the journey not the destination-- yes and I have lost sight of the path. Begin now, start here, at this moment and go forward. Forget about self deprecating recriminations. Forgive yourself and go on. Having rediscovered this bit of wisdom reminds me of the story of the two monks traveling through the country side. They encountered a divan carrying a wealthy noble, stuck in the middle of a muddy road-- the rich woman demanded that the monks carry her across the muddy road so she wouldn't get soiled. The old monk slogged through the mud, picked her up and carried her across, depositing her on the dry side of the road. The rich woman said nothing, not a word of thanks, and turned and walked on her way. The monks continued down the road. After several hours the younger monk said to the older one-- "how could you do that for her? she demanded that you carry her and then didn't even thank you! Are you not angry?" The old monk said "I carried her and left her back there, yet you are still carrying her with you. Who now has the greater burden?"

yes, leave it behind, go forward, start now, begin where you are. do the work, mind the calories, get the papers written the grants submitted, get the garden weeded and house cleaned-- forget that you have lagged behind on all these things, don't carry that burden, instead, get the work done, start now, do it.

takin' off those sailin' shoes

At least for a while I will be staying around town. In the past 12 months I've traveled ~15 times, including 4 trips to DC, Yellowstone, Hawaii, Colorado 3 times, Carbondale twice, San Francisco, Ann Arbor, camping with the Indian Guides in Wisconsin twice.... now for the so called "road warrior" who travels regularly for business, this number of trips would be laughable, but for me it is the most I've ever traveled in a year. Just this week made a very quick trip to Washington DC , Bethesda actually, to visit the NIH. I was invited to give the monthly lecture at the OCCAM, a division of the NCI. Office of Cancer Complementary Alternative Medicine in the National Cancer Institute. This was one of my finest moments, I must say, going to the temple of science and presenting our work on dietary intervention in ovarian cancer. I could tell I delivered a good talk that was well received and garnered many good questions and lots of positive feedback. The cancer community was impressed with the chicken model and our results on suppression of late stage ovarian cancer with flaxseed created quite the buzz. I am working feverishly now to get these data into publishable form. I struggle with how much to say in how many papers. A good problem to have. The OCCAM is a great niche to find myself in. In a few weeks my talk will be published on the NIH website: http://www.cancer.gov/CAM/ under the monthly lecture tab. One of my new colleagues at SIU, Laura Murphy gave the previous talk. We will have the foundation of a critical mass of CAM research at SIU, which is one of the strengths I plan on building my vision of the department around. I felt like a dignitary visiting the NIH in this capacity. My previous trips to the DC area for study section have been much more work than this, reviewing all those grants and assigning scores knowing full and well that only one of two, if that many will get funded. The state of funding for biomedical research is in a terrible crisis. We have an unfunded war costing the US $500,000 a minute, yet the whole of the NIH budget is less than $28 billion for the year-- about a month of funding for the war. And what good is all that spending doing us? NOT ONE SINGLE THING! I must always remind myself of what Werner Herz told me when I graduated from UCHSC with my PhD in Biochemistry-- 25 years ago (!!!) "there will always be a shortage of good people" and so, the answer to the crisis is to do the best you can do, and as I've found in my incarnation as a cancer biologist, its important to be nimble.

Oddly enough when I was googling OCCAM to find the link to the monthly lecture videocast, the first search term that came up was for Occam's Razor, the postulate that simply states: "All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best." Rather a cosmic coincidence. I believe I have found my niche in CAM as we embark on our 2nd funded study, this one to see if broccoli prevents ovarian cancer. And yes, chickens do eat broccoli. Consider Pliny the Elder who wrote Naturalis Historia (AD 79). He is known for his saying "True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written; in writing what deserves to be read". Relevant to my work, he described the anticancer properties of the calabrese a Mediterranean cultivar of broccoli. This made us question, when was cancer as a disease first recognize? The word cancer came from the father of medicine, Hippocrates, a Greek physician. Hippocrates used the Greek words, carcinos and carcinoma to describe tumors, thus calling cancer "karkinos". The Greek terms actually were words to describe a crab, which Hippocrates thought a tumor resembled. Although Hippocrates may have named "Cancer", he was certainly not the first to discover the disease. The history of cancer actually begins much earlier. The world's oldest documented case of cancer hails from ancient Egypt, in 1500 b.c. The details were recorded on a papyrus, documenting 8 cases of tumors occurring on the breast. It was treated by cauterization, a method to destroy tissue with a hot instrument called "the fire drill". It was also recorded that there was no treatment for the disease, only palliative treatment. There is evidence that the ancient Egyptians were able to tell the difference between malignant and benign tumors. According to inscriptions, surface tumors were surgically removed in a similar manner as they are removed today. (from http://cancer.about.com/od/historyofcancer/a/cancerhistory.htm)

So, its good to be staying put for a while, so I can get back to work.... speaking of which....

Cancer is a really bad disease

Cancer is a deadly disease that has taken many of my friends in the past couple of years-- men in the primes of their lives. Most recently our good buddy and bicycle riding companion, Moe Sullivan lost his battle to melanoma. Two years ago my neighbor, friend and colleague at UIC, Rob Costa lost his battle to pancreatic cancer. Pat Quinn who came from the same lab as me at Michigan lost his battle with lung cancer. The loss of these vital people comes at a great cost- medical expenses not the least of the burden. Their potentials had yet to be realized and then they were gone. Cancer is a really bad disease and now that I am a cancer biologist, my sense of altruism is well satisfied knowing I am working on this important disease.

As we prepare our presentations, either posters for meetings or various talks either me or one o my students might give, we say in a light-hearted way "Ovarian cancer is a really bad disease." This of course is the the devastating truth, but our statement is a synopsis, a short hand way of doling out the facts about this deadly disease. More than 24,000 women in the USA are diagnosed with ovarian cancer every year, and more than half of these women will die from their disease. Stage I ovarian cancer is curable in 95% of cases, but due to inadequate screening tools, ovarian cancer is usually detected at a late stage when the prognosis is poor. Most patients who present with ovarian cancer complain of GI problems, abdominal discomfort, feelings of being bloated an irregular-- not symptoms they would suspect were caused by ovarian cancer. Upon examination the distended abdomen is found to be due to a large accumulation of ascites fluid from the ovarian tumor. The cancer has progressed and metastasized throughout the abdominal cavity and the cancer cells are producing large volumes of the ascites fluid. After draining the fluid and surgical removal of the primary tumor and chemotherapy with taxol and carboplatin drugs, the disease will go into remission. about chemotherapy Sadly though, in more than 60% of the cases, the disease will return in a more aggressive and now chemoresistant way-- the growing tumors are no longer sensitive to the chemicals and continue to grow and spread until the women succumbs to the disease. It is indeed a very bad disease.

While there has been significant progress in curing other forms of cancer, ovarian cancer lags behind. The key to the cure is early detection-- for breast, prostate and colon cancers, early detection and treatment provide the patient with an excellent prognosis for long term cancer free survival. And certain other cancers are entirely preventable-- lung cancer is the single most preventable disease correlated to not smoking or quiting cigarette smoking. Cervical cancer is caused by human papalloma virus and vaccination against HPV is very successful in preventing the disease. Cancer biologists have exploited animal models to understand the etiology or cause of these diseases, and have been able to test therapies and perfect therapies while gaining further insight into these cancers. But ovarian cancer research has been hampered by a lack of suitable animal models. In the past ten years several important rodent models for ovarian cancer have been developed in which a tumor suppressor is knocked out and an oncogene is targeted to the ovary-- but these transgenic models are by their nature blind to the cause of the cancer. Ovarian cancer is of epithelial origin, arising from the specialized tissue that covers the ovary, the so called ovarian surface epithelium. Certain of the transgenic models have successfully targeted the surface epithelium by injection of oncogenes under the ovarian bursa, and the resulting disease closely mimics the human disease. These models provide a testing ground for therapies and enable investigation into the progression of later stage disease-- where all of the therapies are targeted. But the cause of the disease can not be determined from this approach.

With the exception of the laying hen, no other accessible animal model recapitulates the human disease. Laying hens get ovarian cancer spontaneously and it is of epithelial origin, just like in humans. The prevailing theory about the cause of ovarian cancer is the so called "incessant ovulation theory" set forth by Fathalla in 1971. The theory postulates that continuous "tear and repair" of the ovarian surface epithelium, which happens every time an egg is ovulated, provides a rich environment for the initiation of the cancer. Ovulation has long been considered to be an inflammatory process, analogous to wound healing. The mature follicle ruptures, bursting through the surface epithelium releasing the egg which is swept into the oviduct. The process is the same in chickens as in humans. In chickens, though, this happens every day-- yes every time a chicken lays an egg it was necessarily preceded by ovulation. Of course what happens to the ovulated oocyte is remarkably different in the chicken. In the oviduct the yolk is surrounded by albumin and then in the shell gland, analogous to the uterus, the hard shell is formed. The post ovulatory ovary is different too-- in the mammal a corpus luteum is formed, and if the egg gets fertilized, the corpus luteum will provide estrogen and progesterone to prepare the uterus for implantation and maintain the early embryo. Fertilized or not, the chicken's egg gets laid, or in the parlance of the poultry scientist, undergoes oviposition.

Despite the differences between the hen and women, the process at the surface of the ovary are essentially identical. Since hen's ovulate every day, by the time they've completed their second year of lay, they have approximately the same reproductive age as a menopausal woman, each having ovulated 450 to 500 times. That is a lot of tear and repair and it is a this time that both women and hens are usually afflicted with ovarian cancer. The incidence in a 2 year old hen is 4%, but in a 6 year old hen, the incidence of ovarian cancer approaches 50%. This provides a relatively short period of time in which the entire disease can be studied. We've made substantial progress already in defining the earlies steps in ovarian cancer in the hen, and them after examining surgical specimens from women, have observed very similar events. Our long term goal to is characterize these events, determine what factors and mediators are involved in driving these first early steps, and then devise a screening strategy based on our understanding of the mechanism through which normal surface epithelial cells become transformed into malignant ovarian cancer cells.

Another advantage of working with the hen, is the opportunity to do large scale interventions are relatively little cost-- compared to doing similar studies in rodents. Stay tuned for a subsequent post in where I will describe these intervention strategies based on functional food enriched diets.

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you gotta be kidding--bang bang

The conservatives in the Supreme Court have had their day and voted 5-4 to overturn the DC ban on handguns, ruling it unconstitutional based on 2nd amendment rights. Within seconds the NRA began to sue every city in the country with handgun bans. The NRA will not be happy until the world we live in is the OK corral and any cross word or lost temper could be rewarded by a slug to the brain. Or until thousands, not just hundreds of innocents are killed by incidental gun fire. Or more little children get their daddy's gun from his bedside table and blow their heads off-- accidently. It's their right to do so, eh? 75% of the homicides in Chicago were committed with handguns despite the ban on handguns. Does that mean that the ban should be repealed? should we do nothing, just stand by and watch the senseless murder of all these people? Do you really think that arming everyone is going to decrease the numbers of people killed with guns? What an absurd notion. Its like pouring gasoline on the fire. Yeah, right, if guns are illegal, then only criminals will have guns, and you're gonna have to pry my cold dead finger of the trigger of my gun to get it away from me, and this house is protected by 357 magnum, and guns don't kill people, people kill people. and on and on. So does all of this mean we should do nothing? Handguns and assault weapons the necessary complement to every hunter's aresenal. Guns were made for one purpose and one purpose only. To kill. People have guns so they can kill people with them. sure, they may say they have them for protection. But that means they will kill someone with their gun to protect themselves. Oops, I didn't mean to kill him, I thought it was a burglar robbing my house, I didn't know it was my teenage son stealing a snack from the fridge late at night. But then maybe these gun nuts would think it OK to kill someone for such a serious crime.