The Austringer

This New York Times article talks about a modern work hazard, the stress of blogging for pay. Apparently, a couple of high-profile technology bloggers have kicked the bucket in an untimely fashion. One of them left an email that may stand as his last words: “Have come down with something. Resting now posts to resume later today or tomorrow.” If that were true, it would be a truly astounding technical feat.

While I’m not in the particular always-on rat race described in the article, I can say that having a research position does offer some of the same potential causes of stress. There is the concern that time is passing, and there is always more to do. I’m not putting myself in the reduced sleep-cycle hole that some of the bloggers described in the article do in order to steal a few minutes’ march on the competition. But I have to admit that over the past year, I have often skipped trying to add content here on my blog in order to have more time for the research.

I would be interested, I think, in finding out more about blogging for pay. I don’t think the bleeding-edge news story angle is for me, but I think I could do something in the way of higher-quality considered analysis of various things ranging from technology through media and politics. If you are looking for that sort of person, you know where to find me.

Diane had it, and it looked like a misery. Rob, my boss, has it now, and he certainly doesn’t look comfortable. I got a flu shot a couple of weeks ago, and until last night I had no symptoms. But within the space of a couple of hours, I went from nothing to severe shivering coupled with muscle and joint pains.

The clinic said they had a treatment to help shorten the course of this stuff, so I need to drag myself to the clinic today.

The proposed science standards for Florida are different from the old standards. One way in which they differ is that the word “evolution” appears in the proposed standards. There were four previous public meetings for comment on the proposed standards, including one in Orlando.

Well, now there is a media advisory out that just one more meeting is being held for public comment. It’s this next Monday, the 11th. It is being held in the daytime, and the state board of education will be watching the proceedings via webcast or by video recording. I believe that this is the only meeting that has had that sort of guaranteed direct linkage to the board. The decision on adoption will be taken in a meeting on the 19th, at which the public cannot speak.

I have some qualms about the way this came up and was organized and executed. If one were looking for a way to minimize the input of teachers and educators from colleges and universities, I could hardly pick a better time than to hold a meeting at midday on a school day. The other meetings were evening meetings. The location is essentially at the Orlando airport. Will there be out-of-state folks dropping in on the proceedings, and how much advance notice might they have gotten to schedule flights if so?

Needless to say, it is vitally important that the board of education receive a clear message from those interested in advancing the state of science education this coming Monday. If this specially convened forum is conceded to the antievolution movement, it is likely to contribute to years of continued poor science education. Please do not let the antievolution movement appear to take the final public word on the issue. Show up and let them know where you stand on this. Don’t just ask to take off from work; convince your boss to go with you.

If you absolutely cannot make the meeting, please do go, right now, and sign the online petition supporting the proposed science standards. Joe Wolf of Florida Citizens for Science is planning to present the list of signers to the petition at Monday’s meeting, so help give him a longer list to deliver.

Now, about the meeting:

MEDIA ADVISORY

February 6, 2008

Tom Butler
(850) 245-0413
Tom.Butler@fldoe.org

Final Public Hearing on Proposed Science Standards to be Held in Orlando

In addition to the four public hearings previously held, the Department of Education on Monday will hold one final public hearing for Rule 6A-1.09401, Student Performance Standards – Science. Attending the hearing will be Education Commissioner Eric J. Smith, K-12 Public Schools Chancellor Frances Haithcock and Florida’s Office of Math and Science Executive Director Mary Jane Tappen.

Any individuals wishing to address the State Board of Education regarding the proposed science standards are invited to speak at the hearing. Speakers will be allotted three minutes each. State Board of Education members will view the hearing via live Web cast or will be presented with a video recording of the entire meeting. The State Board of Education will consider the proposed science standards at the February 19 board meeting. Time at this meeting will be reserved for board member deliberation only.

A presentation will be made at the beginning of the hearing regarding the process used to develop world-class science standards, including access points for students with disabilities.

The final public hearing for the proposed science standards will take place:

Monday, February 11, 2008
10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.
Orlando Hyatt
Orlando International Airport
9000 Airport Boulevard
Orlando

To view the hearing via live Web cast, go to www.fldoe.org.

ELEMENT OF SURPRISE

At the University of South Florida, Professor Jay Dean has equipment that synthesizes two exotic technologies in order to examine something very basic indeed: how oxygen interacts with tissues. The two technological bits are a hyperbaric chamber and an atomic force microscope (AFM). This allows Dean and his colleagues to examine, at an exceedingly small scale, what happens when tissue is exposed to oxygen at a variety of partial pressures. The Office of Naval Research is interested; according to the article, the occasionally fatal seizures that divers using rebreathers experience is a major cause of concern.

Hat tip to Sam Blackwood for the link.

It’s been a while since I discussed what’s up with my medical condition. That’s actually been good news. I’ve been doing pretty well, with a good deal less pain than when I still had my colon.

But because I no longer have that large intestine, there are some things that become a matter of maintenance for me that other folks don’t have to worry about. I’m currently on two medications, Imodium and Lomotil (actually generics for each), which slows down my gut motility, giving the small intestine some time to absorb some of the nutrients that would otherwise simply pass through my system. It also means that with those two medications I can be spared the caustic effects of base chemistry, which if things were left to themselves I’d have some pretty immediate problems with. The prescription directions have been the same since just after my second surgery: 1-2 tablets taken with meals and at bedtime. That’s for each of those medications.

In California, Kaiser Permanente’s system simply set me up with getting 3 months worth of medications at a time, so I would get 500 pills per 3 month period. That worked out OK.

Here in Michigan, things are not quite worked out. I haven’t yet had my introductory visit with my primary care physician here, but I’ve needed refills on the maintenance medications. I’m having some difficulties getting the clinic and pharmacy on the right page. While a physician did set me up with the same prescription directions, what the pharmacy actually delivered for one month’s worth of medication was 60 pills of each drug. That was about 8 days worth of medication.

I managed to talk to the clinic, and they put in another prescription order. This time, the pharmacy delivered 120 pills each. Now, the way I calculate that out, I basically cannot plan to take more than one pill at each indicated time; there simply aren’t enough pills in my month’s allotment to actually take 2 tablets each at each meal and at bedtime. And generally I do take 2 tablets each when I take them. I don’t always have three meals a day, but I often do, so this is putting me behind the curve. Like I mentioned before, if I don’t manage to keep my gut somewhat slowed down, I do end up with a painful situation.

When I brought up this issue with my pharmacist, there were two arguments he gave for why they only gave a fraction of the pills needed to actually meet the demands of my prescription directions: they didn’t think I needed that much medication, and the specific number of pills is provided by the prescriber, so I should take it up with them.

Now, every time I get a partial prescription, I’m still getting hit with a full month’s prescription copay charge. So this nickel-and-diming is having a distinct negative effect on my finances, not to mention any adverse effects I may run into if I run out of meds before I can get an order filled that actually provides the medication I need at the rate I’m supposed to take it. I’m hoping that I can work this out when I talk to my primary care physician early in July.

So, if there are some health care pros tuning in who can shed light on why I’m suddenly running into difficulty getting my medications here in Michigan, I’d like to hear about it.

Diabetes breakthrough

If this news report and the research behind it are accurate, this is a huge story. A tip of the hat to Steve Story, who dropped this link to me in email. I’d say it is comparable to to discovery that most stomach ulcers are due to bacterial infection and not simply stress, except in the other direction. The disease being researched was diabetes, the subject species was mice, and the result was that turning off pancreatic sensory nerves reversed Type I diabetes in mice.

Let that sink in for a moment.

The implication is that Type I diabetes could primarily be caused by a problem in neurology, not simply an auto-immune problem as has been assumed by most physicians. It also opens up possibilities for treatment that go way beyond the current standard of care, insulin replacement therapy.

Of course, there are a lot of steps to be taken, like doing the tests on humans and working up clinical trials for treatments. Even if the research holds up to scrutiny, it will take years before a treatment based upon this new information could become available.

It will not be a surprise, though, if the research does not pan out. In science, there are far more ideas that don’t work than ideas that do. While the process of discovering error is nowhere near foolproof in science, it nonetheless does so reliably enough to cause a strong majority of the population to trust scientists and the work they do highly.

I am really happy to be around for this Thanksgiving. Two years ago I was recovering from major surgery and wondering what life would be like in my future.

Today, we started things off with a visit to a horse ranch in Jamul where Andrea has obtained permission to take the hawks out to try to make a dent in the rabbit population there. We got there about 6:15 AM and the fog was still pretty thick. Between us, we had four Harris’s hawks and three dogs in the field. I think we saw about a dozen rabbits get chased. It must have really been Rabbit Thanksgiving, though, because nobody caught anything, which certainly surprised us.

We then went off to Chula Vista where Andrea boards her horses. A horse Andrea was leading to an exercise ring became uncontrollable and took about five minutes to run around and calm down enough to be caught again. A far more mellow horse of Andrea’s provided a mount for Diane and I to take a short trail ride. Fortunately, we did it all at a walk and there were no nasty surprises along the way.

That, though, did pretty much exhaust me. My stamina is pretty much the one thing that looks to be permanently lowered post-surgery. I had a bit of a nap.

I headed over to Mark’s place around 4 PM for Thanksgiving dinner. Mark went all out in putting together the traditional feast with turkey, gravy, stuffing, bread, and a dessert. Yams were unavailable, so he substituted a batch of sliced carrots cooked in brandy and topped with marshmallows. Brilliant. We made a small dent in the food, then watched a bit of “Ancient Relic”, a German film featuring time travel. Once the plotline became glaringly obvious, we switched over to “Timeline”, another and somewhat more challenging time-travel flick. We also viewed the “Soup Nazi” episode of “Seinfeld” and the “Inside View” documentary about how that episode came about. In that, it was revealed that the real-life soup chef whose character was the basis of the episode had gone off spectacularly on Jerry Seinfeld when Seinfeld insisted on visiting his establishment after the epsiode aired. it seems that not everyone agrees that any publicity is good publicity.

The big difference I’ve seen since my medical troubles back in 2004 is that I am mostly pain-free nowadays. It really makes a difference not to be in some level of pain almost continually. And I am continually grateful to the folks who have gone out of their way to make a place for me in their lives.

The New York Times reports on a cheap new device to help people get good drinking water in places where clean water simply isn’t available.

The invention is called Lifestraw, a plastic tube with seven filters: graduated meshes with holes as fine as 6 microns (a human hair is 50 to 100 microns), followed by resin impregnated with iodine and another of activated carbon. It can be worn around the neck and lasts a year.

Lifestraw isn’t perfect, but it filters out at least 99.99 percent of many parasites and bacteria, the demons in most fatal cases of diarrhea.

Vestergaard Frandsen, a Danish company, has invented this device, which costs about $3 per unit, as well as various other items aimed at parasite control in the developing world. The article notes that about 100,000 of the LifeStraws have been distributed so far.

It also notes that the device is ineffective against viruses and the parasite Giardia, which makes its use for US hikers, campers, and hunters not quite as appealing as it might otherwise be. If there were a version that could be used to pre-treat water that could then be hit with one of the Giardia treatments available, it might sell here in the US. A premium price here could help subsidize distribution to developing countries.

‘Failed’ experiment yields a biocontrol agent that doesn’t trigger antibiotic resistance

New drug blocks influenza, including bird flu virus

The two press releases linked above report work with broad claims for the control of disease.

The first discusses the production of a bacterial plasmid that undergoes lethal runaway self-replication. The researcher also has developed a bacterial host organism for the plasmid, such that the benign host is able to suppress the runaway self-replication. Bacteria with which it conjugates and transfers the new plasmid to do not receive the suppression property, and thus are killed by the new plasmid. It sounds to me like this technology will likely require specific targetting of disease agents, since the generality of each host will be limited by how picky the actual disease agent is in recognizing other bacteria for conjugation. The press release doesn’t give details about how the suppression of the plasmid is accomplished, so it isn’t clear that this property would always remain safely behind in the host organism. Nor is it clear that the obvious optimism of the researchers that the suppression property is unevolvable in disease organisms is well-founded. Another thing to consider is whether in conjugation, the host organism could be made virulent by what it receives from a disease agent. It is possible that answers to these concerns have already been made, but were not communicated in the press release.

The second discusses a broad treatment antiviral agent against influenza viruses, one that blocks the virus from entering cells in its host. The agent in this case is a peptide. The researchers noted 100% protection against infection with various influenza, including the H5N1 viruses (aka “bird flu”). As an “entry blocker”, the new agent differs from vaccines, which prepare the immune system to mount an effective response on infection with a pathogen. A note at the end of the article speculates that it might be possible to generate vaccine-like action with this entry blocker, if the entry blocker could be tuned to block only most instead of all viruses from entry to cells. The idea here is that the patient would get enough viral load to trigger an immune response, but not so much as to make them more than mildly sick. Vaccine production currently requires quite a lot of work to produce a specific vaccine, and given the rapid evolution observed in influenza, by the time a vaccine is produced, the disease agent in the wild may be considerably different, reducing the effectiveness of the vaccine. Being able to produce vaccine-like action on a short time scale and with a cheaper process could help considerably with response to emerging viral disease agents.

Cloned mice created from fully differentiated cells, a milestone in cloning research

The research study finds that fully differentiated cells are actually better for the purpose of cloning than adult stem cells. They worked with mice in this study, and one of the things to note about it was that they did a lot of within-study replication.

Surprisingly, the granulocytes were the most efficient donor cells for nuclear transfer among the different lineage cells, with 35 to 39 percent becoming a blastocyst, an early embryo consisting of about 100 to 150 cells, compared to 11 percent for the progenitor cells and only 4 percent for the stem cells. Only the granulocytes were able to produce two live cloned pups, although both died within a few hours of birth. As a control, the researchers performed nuclear transfer using embryonic stem cells; 49 percent developed to the blastocyst stage and 18 cloned pups were born.

This doesn’t look like any dramatic advance, but it does raise some questions about the efficiency of some methods that are currently used in cloning studies.

ScienceDaily: Elevated Testosterone Kills Nerve Cells

The linked article describes research where cultures of nerve cells show apoptosis - a programmed cell death process - when high concentrations of testosterone are present. The link to human medicine is that treatment with testosterone or other steroids may reach concentrations that trigger apoptosis in the human brain. This could explain the various neurological and behavioral changes noted in steroid abusers, like “hyperexcitability, a highly aggressive nature, and suicidal tendencies”.

The testosterone-induced apoptosis described in this study occurs through overactivation of intracellular Ca2+ signaling pathways. Overstimulation of the apoptotic program in neurons has been associated with several neurological illnesses, such as Alzheimer disease and Huntington disease.

So, when someone mentions “testosterone poisoning”, it’s not just a funny saying anymore.

This morning, Glenn Branch IM’d me a link to the following blog post:

Pure Pedantry : Scientists in FL attempt to make prosthetic dolphin tail

Jake Young follows a quote from the original article with the following:

Crazy town. We should have more programs in animal prosthetics — because animal disability is no laughing matter.

Hmmm. While dolphin tail prosthetics may not have great potential for follow-ons in human biomedical treatment, rather a lot of biomedical progress and medical advances have occurred due to animal models. It seems to me that researchers choosing to work with animals are damned if they do it for the animal’s benefit directly (working on animals is a trivial waste of valuable research time!) and damned if they don’t do it for the animal’s benefit directly (using animals just to help out humans is evil!).

There’s not much that I can see to do about the first; either people get it or they don’t. For the second, though, there is an organization that helps people become aware of the benefits of animal models, the Foundation for Biomedical Research (FBR). Visit their site, consider joining up.

I sure hope that the researchers in Florida do manage to come up with a useful prosthetic. It isn’t a waste of time.

I’ve been under the weather, which accounts for the paucity of posts here. Yes, I know, I was really under the weather when I started this weblog.

In any case, I started feeling some scratchiness in my throat last week. I started taking some zinc lozenges, which seemed to help with the symptoms at least. I made it through my workshop presentation last week and my sermon at the UU church in Walnut Creek this past Sunday all right. Monday, I could hardly talk at all. This is not a good thing for a guy whose scoutmaster used to call him “Motormouth”.

Things aren’t quite so bad today. We’ll see how things shape up for the weekend. If I’m still scratchy, I’m thinking Friday will be a good day to visit my primary care physician.

Back when I was in the hospital in 2004, one thing that helped my state of mind was getting online via dial-up to the Internet. I could do email, surf the web, do instant messaging, and generally keep in touch with reality outside the hospital room. Late in my first stay, an administrative type came by and had a cow over the fact that I had a laptop computer plugged into a power outlet, and also that I had hooked up to the phone line. Neither was allowed, she said.

Let me tell you that the time I spent in the hospital when I couldn’t use my laptop, not for Internet acces, not for DVD-playing, not for any personal data project, was pretty depressing.

Now, some of that could just be me. I haven’t heard of anyone else offhand who set up their weblog in recovery within a couple of days of major surgery. But I’m thinking that perhaps there might be some value to making Internet access available to patients stuck in hospital. There could even be some intra-hospital application, as if there were an instant-messaging-like interface to the nurses’ station, I could have simply typed in what sort of thing was up. Messages to the patient could remind them to get up and walk at intervals.

But I think that investigating the value of providing computer access, and especially Internet access, to hospital patients should be pursued. So, if anybody out there is an M.D. or hospital adminstrator who sees some possibilities there, I would be happy to help in discussing the topic and perhaps collaborating on it.

I’m six foot three inches tall. In 2002 and 2003, I had two instances of idiopathic atrial fibrillation. That last just means that the contractions of the atrial chambers of my heart got out of sync with the rest, and “idiopathic” means that they couldn’t figure out why that happened.

The first time was during a bad flare-up of the ulcerative colitis. My gastroenterologist did about three minutes of colonoscopy and declared me sick. I don’t think he believed me or my medical history until he saw for himself. I was really in a state, because I not only had the ulcerative colitis, but also had a Clostridium difficile infection on top of that. So I went from the usual maintenance drugs for colitis to higher doses of those, a strong antibiotic to deal with the C. difficile, and my first course of steroids, a high daily dose of prednisone. It was after a couple of weeks of that regimen that I was going about collecting the full list of side effects that they warn of in the prednisone patient data sheet (elevated heart rate, sleeplessness, water retention in the feet and lower legs, irritability, paranoia… I swore that if I discovered a “change in menstrual cycle” I was going off the stuff) that I got the first incident of atrial fibrillation. My heart rate went up to about 130 beats per minute and I felt woozy. We went into the emergency room, and after a few hours, they gave me some medication to convert me back to normal rhythm. After about twenty minutes, I synced up again, and my heart rate dropped to the prednisone “normal” of about 90 beats per minute. After that, they gave me a heart rate monitor that I wore for a day, to try to catch any short-term irregularities that would indicate the sort of problems that they knew about treating. Nothing happened. They did an echocardiogram, which showed only a small amount of mitral valve prolapse. Take an antibiotic before procedures like dental work, they said. But otherwise there was nothing that they knew to do about it, except to take a daily dose of aspirin to “thin” the blood a little, making it less likely that I should throw a clot if I were fibrillating and not aware of the fact for more than 24 hours or so.

The second incident was in 2003. Diane and I visited with our friend Janice B. in Albuquerque on the way back from my dissertation defense at Texas A&M. In the morning, we had stopped by a fast-food place and gotten a great big Coca-Cola soft drink for sipping as we drove there. We had dinner, then Janice took us to ride the tram to the observation platform near the peak of Sandia Mountain. As the doors on the tram were closing, I felt my heart doing something different. I told Diane and Janice that I was having another atrial fibrillation episode, then had a lie-down on the floor of the tram as we had about a fifteen minute ride up. It was another thirty minutes before the next tram went down. On the car ride back to Janice’s place, I converted back to normal rhythm on my own. When we got back home, I had another couple of rounds with the monitor, but nothing further was found. I have stayed away from caffeine since that incident, though. Later, my sister told me that, yes, she has that, too, and she’s known to avoid caffeine for years now.

So today I’m looking at ScienceDaily and find an article there titled, “Taller People More Likely To Develop Atrial Fibrillation”. A study at Emory University found that risk of atrial fibrillation increased with increasing height.

Analysis of data from a registry of patients with left ventricular dysfunction indicates that height is an independent risk factor for an arrhythmia of the upper chambers of the heart, according to a new study in the April 18, 2006, issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

“Tall stature is a potent risk for the development of atrial fibrillation and is independent of other clinical risk factors. Indeed, the male predominance of atrial fibrillation appears to be explained by the difference in height between men and women,” said Jonathan J. Langberg, M.D. from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

Atrial fibrillation is the most common sustained cardiac arrhythmia. During an episode, the upper chambers of the heart flutter instead of pumping blood effectively. The incidence increases as people age, with a prevalence of more than 5 percent in patients over the age of 65 years.

[...]

“Tall patients may need more aggressive attempts to attenuate risk factors. Controlled trials should evaluate stature in treatment and control arms,” Dr. Langberg said.

[...]

“Although the paper supports previous evidence of a relationship between atrial size and atrial fibrillation, there is no therapeutically applicable outcome from the study, because you can’t alter your height as a risk factor for atrial fibrillation!” Prof. Feneley said.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute are using a new technique in light microscopy to image individual synaptic vesicles of a neuron. Ordinary light microscopy doesn’t have the resolution to pick out individual vesicles, but what they call STED microscopy can do so.

Fig.1: [Stimulated Emission Depletion] STED microscopy: The excitation light beam (EXC beam, in blue) is steered by a mirror through the objective lens, and due to diffraction is focused to a spot ca. 200 nm in diameter on the sample. The excitation light excites fluorescent markers which tag molecules of interest (e.g. proteins) in the sample. The markers are excited to a higher energy state, from which they emit light of a longer wavelength (via fluorescence decay) when they return to the ground state. By scanning this blue excitation spot over the sample (the cell) and recording the emitted fluorescent light with a computer, one can form an image of the sample. The smaller the excitation spot is, the higher the resolution of the microscope. However, due to diffraction, the excitation spot cannot be made smaller than ~200 nm by focusing with a lens. The trick with STED microscopy is that one uses a second beam (STED beam, in orange) to quench the fluorescent markers before they fluoresce. Because the STED beam is doughnut-shaped and centered over the excitation spot, one is able to preferentially quench the markers at the outer edge of the excitation spot and not those in the center. The result is a smaller effective fluorescence spot (green), here reduced to a diameter of ~66 nm. By making the STED doughnut very intense, it is in principle possible to shrink the fluorescent spot to molecular size, thus attaining molecular resolution - an exciting goal for the near future.

This is obviously not a great way to go for moving subjects, but for a fixed preparation, this sounds like an exciting technique.

Last Thursday, my sister, Emily Kay May, arrived from Australia. She came in via a military transport hop to Travis AFB near Fairfield, then caught a BART bus to reach the Pleasant Hill BART station. At the time she telephoned me, I was at the Kaiser Permanente medical offices in Walnut Creek talking with my gastroenterologist about the abdominal pain I had about three weeks earlier. I told Emily I’d be there in about half an hour.

(more…)

The cold may be resolving itself, but various other issues are popping up. I started having abdominal pain yesterday. I was thinking about whether to trundle myself off to the emergency room, but I called an advice nurse at Kaiser, described my symptoms, and she said that they’d arrange a doctor’s appointment.

So I went to see the doctor today (escorted by Nick Matzke, who shepherded me around health care today — thanks, Nick!). Another thing that showed up today was a slight loss of feeling in my left hand. So I let my doctor know what’s been up (cold, abdominal pain, loss of feeling) and she looked me over. She did a palpation of my abdomen, confirming the region and extent of tenderness. She also listened to my lungs, and expressed concern that I might have an early case of pneumonia on the right side. So it was off to another building for a couple of chest X-rays. In the meantime, she contacted the gastroentorology folks at the hospital about my case. When we met again, she showed me the scanned X-rays on the computer in the exam room, a cool thing. No pneumonia, they showed, but I may have a small amount of atelectasis, which she assured me was not uncommon following a severe cold.

The gastroenterologists will want to see me soon, but not immediately. In the meantime, my doctor has set me up for a bunch of lab tests to follow a 12 hour fast. I figure to fast Sunday evening to Monday morning and get the labs taken then. Hopefully, I will get some news on the appointment with the gastroenterology people early next week, too. In the meantime, I should not stress my system too much, and head for the emergency room on the appearance of certain symptoms (I have the list). Oh, about the hand… could be compression of the ulnar nerve, carpal tunnel syndrome, or a couple other things. I may get a nerve conduction test by and by. What fun.

Nick and I grabbed sandwiches on the way back to my house, then watched some episodes of Firefly to take up time until the rush hour traffic was over.

One of the side effects of travelling and talking is getting to meet lots of new people… and being exposed to new viruses. I picked one up this last trip and am suffering through a cold at the moment. I’m sure that if I do everything just right, I can be rid of it in seven days, but if I don’t, it may linger for a week.

A Science Daily item notes that an experimental cancer treatment for dogs with melanoma shows some promising results. The technique involves making a vaccine by culturing melanoma cells, turning off the runaway reproduction of those cells, then adding DNA to also have those cells make proteins that stimulant the immune system.

As is usual, funding is an issue. There is a lot of demand for the vaccine treatment, though, so perhaps this will become a commercially viable product.