Like me, you’ve probably heard the news: a government panel of doctors and scientists published guidelines this week advising most women in their 40s to stop getting routine mammograms and urging 50- to 74-year-old females to only get a mammogram every other year. Seven years ago, the same advisory group recommended that women have mammograms every one to two years starting at age 40.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force said that while mammography reduces breast cancer deaths, they believe such benefits are small for younger women compared to the potential harms: anxiety, costs and overtreatment.
Sen. Ted Kennedy, shown here with Hutchinson Center founder Dr. Bill Hutchinson at the Center's 1975 grand opening, sponsored the National Cancer Act in 1971. (Credit: Hutchinson Center file photo)
When Sen. Ted Kennedy succumbed to brain cancer in August, the Massachusetts Democrat had already established himself as a fierce advocate for federally sponsored biomedical research. But, perhaps inevitably, he left behind some unfinished business: the most sweeping piece of cancer legislation since the National Cancer Act, which he sponsored back in 1971.
“We’ve come a long way in fighting cancer since we passed the National Cancer Act thirty-eight years ago, but not far enough,” the late senator said in a statement in March upon introducing the new bill with Texas Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein. “Americans still live in fear that they or someone they love will be affected.”
Scorpion toxin has been used to illuminate brain cancer
On my first day at the Hutchinson Center, I was asked to write a lengthy feature story about Chlorotoxin:Cy5.5 for Quest magazine. Make it interesting, make it exciting, and make it snappy, my boss told me. Would you like some fries with that? I asked—at least in my mind I did.
And so I set out to interview Dr. Jim Olson, the man behind this laboratory concoction using scorpion toxin to illuminate brain cancer that already was being hailed as an invaluable tool in the fight against the disease.
I liked Jim right away. This is someone who has spent a lifetime working to save the lives of children with cancer. He was, as I described him in my story, an affable guy with a pleasant smile.
But as he talked about Chlorotoxin:Cy5.5, my synapses went into hyper-overdrive as I tried to understand just what the heck he was talking about.
In science writing for the masses, they tell you to keep the writing to at least a fifth-grade level; and yet, I felt like I was still a kindergartner, probably in diapers. Sure I love science, but Olson’s words were not distilled for the masses. And this is a guy who wrote a book, Clinical Pharmacology Made Ridiculously Simple.
