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....
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