Mina Bissell will never forget the reception she got from a prominent scientist visiting Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she worked. She gave him a paper she had just published on the genesis of cancer.
“He took the paper and held it over the wastebasket and said, ‘What do you want me to do with it?’ Then he dropped it in.”
– "Old ideas spur new approaches in cancer fight," New York Times
Interesting piece on new/old thinking about how cancer tumors spread, and how that spread might be arrested by addressing the healthy cells around the tumor.
“Think of it as this kid in a bad neighborhood,” said Dr. Susan Love, a breast cancer surgeon and president of the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation. “You can take the kid out of the neighborhood and put him in a different environment and he will behave totally differently.”
“It’s exciting,” Dr. Love added. “What it means, if all this environmental stuff is right, is that we should be able to reverse cancer without having to kill cells. This could open up a whole new way of thinking about cancer that would be much less assaultive.”
There's more research to be done, especially since this direction has been largely dismissed by the cancer establishment for decades.
I also can't help but notice that two of the key scientists, whose early papers are now seen a new light, are named Mina and Beatrice.
