Monthly Archives: February 2013

“Race for the Cure” “Until We Find a Cure” The disease is so ubiquitous, no one one even bothers to name it anymore. When I was younger, I believed there might be a cure. At one point, I even believed I might discover the cure.

But that was before I came to appreciate that it was not one disease in need of a cure, but hundreds, or taken to the extreme point of view, that every incidence was as unique as a snowflake, at least from a genetic point of view. That was before this disease reached its current incidence of affecting 1-in-3 women and 1-in-2 men. I believed in a cure before cancer killed my father. After that, I believed that the problem of cancer was too big, too complex for anyone to cure.

Ten years later, I still hold to that belief. The more I learn about cancer biology, the more daunting the problem becomes. But recently, especially as I view cancer biology through the eyes of my students, I have hope. Cancer may be too big a problem for any ONE person to solve. Indeed cancer has proven too much for a host of scientists and clinicians spending millions upon millions of dollars in research. But what if we opened up the problem of cancer to EVERYBODY who wanted to contribute? For a number of unrelated and somewhat anecdotal reasons, I am hopeful this strategy might work:

1. Jack Andraka – Several of my students have been blogging about Jack Andraka. Caitlyn’s post is the most recent. Jack is a 15-year-old who has developed a rapid, sensitive and super-cheap (3 cents!) early detection test for pancreatic cancer. Jack was inspired when he lost a close family friend to this disease. He conducted his research on the Internet, initially with simple Google searches. And after contacting 200 ‘real’ scientists, he found one, a professor at Johns Hopkins, who let Jack into his lab to test his ideas. How many other Jack Andraka’s might be out there?

2. Foldit – The Foldit story is well known now. To whom does science turn  to solve the protein folding problems that elude the world’s leading structural biologists? To gamers, of course. Scientists had been unable to solve the structure of the HIV protease, a key target for AIDS prevention and treatment, for decades. Players of Foldit, a free Internet game, discovered the protease structure in just three months.

3. Naked mole rats – Naked mole rats never get cancer. Never ever. Their near relative, the garden variety rat, has a 70% lifetime incidence of cancer if something else doesn’t kill it first. The National Cancer Institute doles out the majority of its funding to support research on just a handful or so of ‘model organisms’ for cancer. Rats, mice, fruit flies, brewer’s yeast. While these organisms span quite a phylogenetic range, they do not begin to represent the diversity of species that might offer insight into this disease. Bolker and Raff made this point  eloquently years ago (Bolker and Raff, 1997, J. NIH Res. 9:35-39) as a backlash to a bold assertion that zebrafish need be the only model organism for vertebrate development. What are we missing by not investigating cancer, or the lack thereof, in as many organisms as possible?

I suspect that many scientists would argue that there just aren’t enough of us to go around. We can’t study everything.  I get it. As a developmental cell biologist, I spent well over a decade investigating the first five hours of life in a single species of frog. So what if we deputized a few thousand – maybe a few million – other people to help us out? So what if they don’t have PhDs? Jack Andraka doesn’t have a PhD. I’m not even sure he can drive a car yet.

What if cancer, which is already everybody’s problem, became everybody’s problem to solve? What if in addition to asking everyone to open their hearts and their wallets, we asked them to open their minds? What if?

Here’s a post that will double for my Cancer Biology class blog and for my personal blog. How’s that for efficient?

Teaching cancer biology is a love/hate situation for me. Love the students. Hate cancer. Love the cells, the molecules, the signaling pathways, the microscopy. Hate cancer. Love how engaged my students are becoming with the material and how hard they are working. Hate, hate, hate cancer!

One of the first pieces of information that I share with my students is the lifetime probability of getting cancer. In the US, it’s 1 in 3 for women and 1 in 2 for men. Those are staggering, haunting statistics. When I taught graduate cancer biology almost a decade ago, the focus of discussion was treatment, and while that is still a significant part of the current course, science, society and my students have noticeable shifted attention to the topic of prevention.

Given today’s lifestyles, it might be more efficient to talk about what doesn’t cause cancer. Avoiding carcinogens seems almost impossible. This morning while I was fighting obesity, which shows a strong correlation with cancer, by running hill repeats my neighbor was warming up his car for 30 minutes in his driveway located at the top of the hill!!! I might as well have rewarded myself with a Marlboro after every lap.

Sometimes it’s hard to sort out the facts from the urban legends with respect to carcinogens. I often rely as much on my ‘mom intuition’ as much I do on my PhD in cell, molecular and developmental biology. And I think most moms would agree that anything that does this to your kid’s tongue – and face – and hands….

…just can’t be good for you.

Artificial food colorings make me nervous in general, but I am particularly frightened of reds. In 1976, red dye No. 2 was banned by the FDA because of studies showing that high doses could cause cancer in rats. Goodbye red M&Ms. And hello to a longstanding war between moms and artificial dyes. I’d consumed a good eight years worth of red dye No. 2 so my mom was able to blame it on pretty much everything that was wrong with me. In recent years, red dyes have been correlated with everything from ADHD to depression to potentially, cancer.

Apparently, this red-o-phobia never quite made it to the Southeastern US. When I first moved to Virginia, I was introduced to that southern delicacy known as red velvet cake.

mmm, red velvet cake

Ooh, that was good stuff. Being a pretty serious baker myself, it wasn’t long before I attempted my first red velvet cake and was horrified when I read the ingredients list. Two tablespoons of red food coloring. TABLESPOONS! That had to be a typo, right? Maybe two drops or teaspoons at worst. I found another recipe. FOUR TABLESPOONS! That seemed like enough red dye to kill off a whole colony of rats. I double-checked the food coloring box to make sure red dye No. 2 wasn’t still marketed down South.

Phew. This was red dye No. 40. Forty!!! What happened to red dyes No. 3 – 39? How many poor rats would have to keel over before people realized that cakes were not meant to be red?

Which brings us to Valentine’s Day and a mother’s dilemma. Cool moms make cupcakes. Really cool moms make chocolate cupcakes with pink frosting. I want to be a really cool mom. But I also don’t want to be feeding my kids carcinogens, real or imagined.

Thank goodness for for Joy the Baker! This lady is a baker, and a blogger, after my own heart. Kroger, the local grocery store, is featuring her recipes, which is how I discovered her defense against artificial red dyes: chocolate beet cake with beet cream cheese frosting. I know what you are thinking:  “EEEEWWW!” That was my first reaction too. I’m not a beet fan, but I was desperate enough to try anything to substitute for red dye No. 40. My daughter Chloe and I used the recipe to make cupcakes, and I must say they were delicious – rich, moist, very pink, and not beety at all.

a baker’s dozen. For me, that’s 12 minus the one I ate.

Not only do beets not cause cancer, but they might actually guard against cancer, colon cancer in particular. So the next time you are in the mood for something sweet and red, consider trying Joy’s recipe at the link above. It can’t be beet (sorry, I couldn’t help myself).

2013 may prove to be the year of challenges for me. A new administrative job with some awesome opportunities and the responsibilities to go with them. The Boston Marathon, at last. And far from least, offering a cancer biology class in an active learning format.

When I was first asked to teach the course, I thought, “no problem.” I’ve been teaching a sophomore cell and molecular biology course for 50+ students in a SCALE-UP setting for three years now, and each iteration worked better than the last. Cancer Biology was a senior level class. The students would be even more mature and many would be repeaters from Cell and Molecular Biology. The material was inherently interesting. And I’d taught a graduate level course in cell cycle and cancer many times. I felt a little guilty, as I often do when it comes to teaching. I really shouldn’t get paid to have this much fun. Then I asked about the enrollment. I didn’t want to take up precious time in the SCALE-UP classroom if we could all fit around a conference table. Or maybe we could just have class at Panera until the weather turned warmer and then we’d sit under a tree.

“A hundred twenty.”

“A hundred twenty, WHAT?,” I asked.

“Students.”

Gosh. We’d have to find a really large tree.

And therein I found the challenge. And hopefully the opportunity to earn my faculty paycheck. An “active learning” setting is the way to go, I am convinced. And really, as many others have said before me, does authentic learning ever occur if the learner is not active?

But to replicate the SCALE-UP setting for 120 students seemed near impossible. How would I find the time to connect with each student? And cancer biology is a dense and rich discipline. The best material comes from the scientific literature, and I want the best for my students. But that literature is difficult to locate and even harder to read. So how could I connect with and guide 120 students through this horrifying, fascinating and murky landscape called cancer biology? In the end, I reached way down into the recesses of my bag of teacher tricks and pulled out:

1) scare them away. Honestly, I didn’t mean to use this one. For the first day of class, I put on my cutest dress and smile and my cowgirl boots determined to sell everybody a ticket on  the Cancer Biology Express. I was a bit flustered when the pseudo-SCALE-UP classroom didn’t deliver everything promised and my laptop did not want to play nice with the projector, but all-in-all, I thought the first day went pretty well. However, by the end of the week 120 was down to 100 and today down to 93. Wow! I’ve never lost that many before. What happened? I’ve been told by some senior biological science students before that they reach my class without ever having had to write  or speak or work in a group for a science lecture class. If that’s the case, I can see how a class that incorporates blogging and team projects and daily discussion could seem like too much work or just plain scary. I’m sad to see them go, but 93 does feel a whole lot more manageable I have to admit.

2)- and this is what I really intended to blog about – lecturing. I’ve become a strong critic of professors whose exclusive teaching tool is the stand-and-deliver lecture. The sage on the stage who delivers a monologue while the students obediently try to capture his every word. Or go on Facebook. Or text their moms. Lecturing may be active teaching, but for the student, the experience seems the antithesis of active learning. But for 120 (OK, 93) students trying to learn content and context as advanced as cancer biology, I couldn’t think of any better way to help them through some of it.

So I decided to lecture once a week on Fridays. The first lecture was OK, but I was rusty. I wasn’t used to talking to students for more than 20 or 30 minutes, and I actually got a little winded. The second week, I had planned to talk about the discovery of oncogenes. It’s a wonderful story, one of the best in science. In the early 20th century, people thought cancer was contagious. And then one scientist discovered that sometimes it is, at least in chickens. Then he isolated the infectious agent and it turned out to be a virus. Interesting. Then decades later, early molecular biologists pinpointed the viral gene responsible for causing cancer and discovered that the gene’s origin is the chicken itself. And the chicken gene was perfectly normal and found in every cell. And the same could happen in humans, for example with human papillomavirus, which causes cervical cancer. As I was lecturing, I grew more and more animated. I wasn’t satisfied with my students learning the information, I wanted to captivate them with this tale. Yes, I wanted them to care as much about the src gene as I did. Gosh, I wanted to convert them.

Lecturing can be a bit of a rush, and by the end, I was feeling downright evangelical. In fact, after dedicating the class to one of my favorite college professors, Dr. Andy Laudano, who first told me the story of the src gene, I preached to  my students to make the effort to give a word of thanks to their favorite professors because that appreciation means a lot. Perhaps I went a bit too far. I hope not.

I’m more convinced than ever that lecturing can be dangerous, and I’ll be careful. On Sundays, I go to church and listen with both ears to the good word for an hour or so. Then I spend the rest of the week trying to put into practice what I heard. Sometimes it’s not easy, but that is when I learn the most. And while my lectures may be trivial in comparison, I hope that they offer a small measure of inspiration for my students to do the same.