I left State College in the early afternoon for a meeting of the National Association of Science Writers, which was being held in New Haven, across the street from Yale University. My closest connection with Yale has been to see its facsimile on the Gilmore Girls, when Rory goes off to school there in season 3 or 4.
The morning before I left, I sat in on a series of lectures at Penn State on translational medicine, the science behind some of the next generation of advances in applying basic science to medical breakthroughs. Some of the things I heard were amazing. One of the speakers was working with a team of doctors and medical researchers to deliver drugs in tiny nanoparticles of calcium phosphate to tumor cells, where they would dissolve and destroy the cells. No more horrible side effects. Another had built a machine that simulated the walls of blood vessels so he could understand how cancer cells are able to attach themselves to the blood vessels in order to burrow into the underlying tissue and devise ways to keep them from attaching. The third Penn State researcher had developed the first simple device to grow bone tissue in the lab and keep it growing indefinitely, also to study how cancer cells infiltrate bone and try to find ways to block them.
That was the beginning of five days of scientific workshops and lectures that filled an entire notebook with my notes. Some 600 science writers from across the country were in New Haven, Ct., for talks on the latest research on chronic depression, climate change, autism, the human genome, personalized medicine, and even trying to build organs from scratch.
We learned that deep brain stimulation can be used to treat the worst kinds of depression, basically by putting wires deep in the brain and running a small electric current through them. The patients say it is like lifting a dark cloud from their thoughts. We heard from a Penn State climate scientist embroiled in the political furor over global warming about how far the public debate has lagged behind what scientists already are sure about. We also heard a reason why this might be the case – that is, that threatening people is counterproductive, and that the messenger makes a difference; Al Gore will never be believed by a large part of the public.
We heard about a way of discovering the genes involved with various diseases using the outlier strategy, that is, looking for families with high numbers of the disease and finding which genes are common in that family. A similar method looks for rare variants of a disease such as low blood pressure to discover which genes are involved. Not long ago it cost $100,000 to sequence one million pairs of DNA; today it costs 25 cents to do the same number. The result is a new understanding of diseases that affect children, including autism and Tourette’s syndrome. By looking at families with a range of these disorders, they have been able to identify which genes are malfunctioning and in which areas of the brain.
Stem cells are controversial, but new methods of reprogramming adult cells to create embryonic-like stem cells will lead to the next generation of medicine, one in which organs can be repaired or grown outside the body, new blood vessels can be grown and implanted into an ill baby’s heart, aging can be slowed, and your own stem cells can be used to discover exactly which drugs work best for your particular illness.
We were taught that as science writers we should be skeptical of the kinds of claims I have just repeated in the paragraphs above, that drug companies really do bury unfavorable facts and that researchers can pick the results they hope to see out of inconclusive data.
In a later post, I’ll describe the town and the Yale campus, which sits in the center of New Haven like an ancient fortress citadel on the edge of the modern world.
Very exciting, Walt. I love it when you take us along for the ride. Thanks. Again.
Great stuff. I’m envious. Thanks for sharing, and I look forward to your thoughts on Yale and New Haven.