Prostate Cancer

Speaking of which, jokes are harder to tell these days, especially the good ethnic ones, for fear of being accused of offending.

NOW LET ME tell you why this is all so important.

In the past, this sanitization of what we say and do would have been debate-worthy, but only a minor irritant to our quality of life.

But in the post-9/11 world, these trends represent a threat to our survival.

No wonder that 4 ½ years after 9/11, we're still flying blind in the war on terror, refusing to accept that the fact that radical Islamic terrorists usually evidence the common denominators of race, sex, age, ethnicity and, yes, appearance.

And isn't it curious that there is more attention paid to the half-dozen knuckleheads responsible for some truly minor indiscretions at Abu Ghraib than the good work of the 140,000 other honorable servicemen and women?

Have you wondered why there is more concern for whether we played Christina Aguilera music too loud for detainee No.

063 at Guantanamo than the fact that this same guy would have been hijacker No.

20, cutting throats with box-cutters on 9/11, had he gotten past customs officials when he tried to get into Orlando International Airport a month before 9/11?

Or that we actually have had a debate about whether to print political cartoons that work radical Islam into a lather?

It's because we are no longer a country that respects our differences, thoug...

Even before the cuts were announced, cancer scientists and activists began a campaign of op-ed articles, e-mail alerts and public events.

Cancer groups launched lobbying of the House with a rally Tuesday, and they are planning to deluge representatives with calls and e-mail as a vote nears, said Wendy Selig, vice president for legislative affairs at the American Cancer Society.

They have crafted a message to make the point that cancer patients will be hurt just as emerging discoveries of therapies that target a patient's cells or spur the body's immune system portend improved treatments.

"We're not just saying we need more" money, said Ellen V.

Sigal, founder and chairwoman of Friends of Cancer Research in Washington.

"We're talking more tangibly about what's been accomplished and what's at stake." Beyond the loss of research grants, scientists fear a longer-term effect: the shift of talented young researchers to different work, because that's where the money is.

One scientist who made such a move is Dr.

Stuart Lutzker, who went to Genentech in San Francisco from the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway, N.J.

Lutzker said his primary motivation was to work on drug development, rather than basic science, but that money for research was a factor.

The intense competition for academic research grants, he said, was difficult.

"One thing that makes in...

“We have a novel approach to cancer.

We know the initiating step,” said Dr.

Ercole Cavalieri of the Eppley Cancer Institute, University of Nebraska Medical Center.

“We think prevention of cancer is a problem we can solve by eliminating this initiating step.

Estrogens can induce cancer when natural mechanisms of protection do not work properly in our body, and the estrogen quinones are able to react with DNA.

In fact, if these protections are insufficient, due to genetic, lifestyle or environmental influences, then cancer can result.

“Now that we have the basic knowledge about a unifying mechanism of cancer initiation, we have a greater sense of urgency to assess people at risk and, at the same time, begin prevention by using specific natural compounds.” The study describes how the catechol estrogen quinones react with DNA to produce specific mutations that may trigger breast, prostate and other human cancers.

“We’ve known about these catechol estrogen quinones for a long time, through many different studies that we’ve done, but our most recent results hav...