A Gift

I’ve been given a gift from the gods. I am on sabbatical and my Mom is dying. This means I can arrange my work schedule so I can be with her. Functionally I can help by watching out for her at night. Metaphysically I can process her decline and maybe finally become a grown up.

Because I have to admit I have not really experienced death so much. I was at sea when my dad died. My grandparents’ deaths were pretty much hidden from me. My sweet wife was very much present for each of her two parents’ deaths, but I wasn’t really there. Although watching her live through those passages gave me a sense of what it is all about.
So here I am. I’m using you, mister blog, and you blog readers, as a crutch. Perhaps writing from the perspective of the professor-on-sabbatical that I am supposed to be will give me a stable platform.

Biologically, cancer is a strange affair. It is really all about a cell of your body staging a revolution; reverting to its ancestral state, a single cell trying to grow and divide faster than all the other competing cells in its neighborhood. Somehow, this cell manages to slip past a huge number of checks and brakes put up by your body to prevent this evolutionary reversal. These checks and brakes work very well when we are young, but they tend to wear out as we age. Seems like everything wears out as we age.

Actually, recent research is finding that cancer has a wide variety of forms. Remember me writing about the “transcriptome”? The list of all the genes that are activated in particular cells? Well, cell biologists are now frantically categorizing particular cancers by their transcriptomes. It seems that each clone of cancer cells (e.g., tumor), be it a lymphoma or brain cancer or colon cancer, has its own distinctive transcriptome. The hope is that by characterizing these cancers’ transcriptomes, we can ultimately design therapies, specific to each cancer, that can re-instate the discarded checks and brakes, and stop the cells from their incessant growing and dividing.

Most of you know this, that cancer is a multiheaded monster. Eventually, maybe even in my lifetime, scientists will know enough about how to fashion specific weapons for any ugly headed cancer cell that crops up.

But not in my mom’s lifetime.