The reports we will look at concern cancer. An illness that kills a huge number of people every year.
The newspapers we read often take a serious scientific report and twist the findings out of all proportion.
"There's nothing like a bacon sarnie with brown sauce," says 36-year-old Nicola Doran as she waits in the queue at JBS butchers in east London.
Ms Doran's sentiments have been echoed across the country by meat enthusiasts who are turning a blind eye to the latest announcement from the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF), which states that bacon is such a cancer risk it should be avoided entirely.
The mother-of-two said: "It wouldn't put me off eating pork or bacon. I'm Irish, and people in Ireland were born and bred on pork; it's their number one meat and it never did them any harm."
It is business as usual in the Tower Hamlets butchers, providers of meat to the east London community for the past 30 years. John Gaynor, manager of JBS, is convinced that shoppers will not take the latest scare over the relationship between meat consumption and cancer seriously.
Charities try to make the message comprehensible and coherent.
Raising awareness of the avoidable risks of cancer and the importance of screening and early detection
Research suggests that around half of all cancers could be prevented by changes to lifestyle.
Our 5 Key Messages
The actual research is almost incomprehensible to the general public, but also to most newspaper reporters (I guess)
http://www.dietandcancerreport.org/downloads/chapters/prelims.pdf
At the same time other Scientific discoveries go unreported...
A dark side of stem cells—their potential to turn malignant—is at the root of a handful of cancers and may be the cause of many more.
Eliminating the disease could depend on tracking down and destroying these elusive killer cells
After more than 30 years of declared war on cancer, a few important victories can be claimed, such as 85 percent survival rates for some childhood cancers whose diagnoses once represented a death sentence.
In other malignancies, new drugs are able to stop the disease developing further, making it a condition with which a patient can live.
Conventional wisdom has long held that any tumor cell remaining in the body could potentially reignite the disease. Current treatments therefore focus on killing the greatest number of cancer cells. Successes with this approach are still very much hit-or-miss and for patients with advanced cases of the most common solid tumor malignancies, the prognosis remains poor.
Moreover, in a few cancers it is now clear that only a tiny percentage of tumor cells have the power to produce new cancerous tissue and that targeting these specifi c cells for destruction may be a far more effective way to eliminate the disease. Because they are the engines driving the growth of new cancer cells and are very probably the origin of the malignancy itself, these cells are called cancer stem cells. But they are also quite literally believed to have once been normal stem cells or their immature offspring that have undergone a malignant transformation.
This idea—that a small population of malignant stem cells can cause cancer—is far from new. Stem cell research is considered to have begun in earnest with studies during the 1950s and 1960s of solid tumors and blood malignancies. Many basic principles of healthy tissue genesis and development were revealed by these observations of what happens when the normal processes derail.
Today the study of stem cells is shedding light on cancer research.
Scientists have filled in considerable detail over the past 50 years about mechanisms regulating the behavior of normal stem cells and the cellular progeny to which they give rise. These fresh insights, in turn, have led to the discovery of similar hierarchies among cancer cells within a tumor, providing strong support for the theory that rogue stemlike cells are at the root of many cancers.
These details studied in the last 50 years include, The cell cycle, interphase, cell division, mitosis, precise control of mitosis, specific uses of mitosis.
How does Cancer Develop |
Syllabus section Cell Division |
Normal control of the cell cycle goes wrong, |
Outline the stages in the cell cycle, including interphase (G1, S, G2), mitosis and cytokinesis. |
and the cells go into non-stop division. |
State that tumours (cancers) are the result of uncontrolled cell division and that these can occur in any organ or tissue. |
Much of this control of cell cycle happens in Interphase. This is the time when the genes are providing the instructions for the cells activity. Neighbouring cells are also known to affect the behaviour of cells. |
State that interphase is an active period in the life of a cell when many metabolic reactions occur, including protein synthesis, DNA replication and an increase in the number of mitochondria and/or chloroplasts. |
Mitosis – stepping stones activity The steps of mitosis were the first target of cancer treatment. If you can stop mitosis, or kill cells doing mitosis they you will stop cancer, without damaging those cells who are in interphase. (most body cells) |
Describe the events that occur in the four phases of mitosis (prophase, metaphase, anaphase and telophase). |
Write a paragraph in your own words.
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Explain how mitosis produces two genetically identical nuclei. |
Four uses of Mitosis: Without mitosis we would quickly run out of skin, blood cells and intestines. Stem cells are known to migrate to areas of cell damage to effect repairs using mitosis. The humble Amoeba reproduces using mitosis (asexual reproduction). |
State that growth, embryonic development, tissue repair and asexual reproduction involve mitosis. |
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