Time Immortal

Shaun Barrowes writes in with a bit of a plea.

My brother was recently diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor and is now fighting it. So I’ve decided to get involved.

I’ve started a fund raiser for Cancer Research to help all those fighting cancer.

Between now and Christmas of 2008, 100% of the proceeds from the sales of my current single, “Never for My Sake” will be donated to Cancer Research. As a musician, it’s my way of giving back and supporting a cause I believe in.

For more details on this fund raiser, visit my blog: shaunbarrowes.blogspot.com

I know you’ve got a lot of readers, and probably a lot of people asking for you to post something for them. This isn’t for me, it’s for all those like my brother currently fighting cancer. So if you could at least check it out and see if it’s something you’d like to mention on your blog, it’d really help us out! Thanks!

Always glad to be of assistance!

Give this man’s blog a visit, O Reader, and check out his website as well. Not a bad little tune, either — and it would appear to be available through iTunes if, like me, that is your preferred method of acquiring new music.

The fools! Don’t they realize that this is how I Am Legend’s apocalypse happened?

Okay, all joking aside, some new research into using a virus to hunt down cancer in the brain is kind of cool. Still…rabies?

“In the past few years, scientists have looked to viruses as potential allies in fighting cancer. Now researchers at Yale University have found a virus in the same family as rabies that effectively kills an aggressive form of human brain cancer in mice. Using time-lapse laser imaging, the team watched vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) rapidly home in on brain tumors, selectively killing cancerous cells in its path, while leaving healthy tissue intact. ‘A metastasizing tumor is fairly mobile, and a surgeon’s knife can’t get out all of the cells,’ says Anthony Van den Pol, lead researcher and professor of neurosurgery and neurobiology at Yale. ‘A virus might be able to do that, because as a virus kills a tumor cell, it could also replicate, and you could end up with a therapy that’s self-amplifying.’ It’s not yet clear why VSV is such an effective tumor killer, although Van den Pol has several theories. One possible explanation may involve a tumor’s weak vascular system. Vessels that supply blood to tumors tend to be leaky, allowing a virus traveling through the bloodstream to cross an otherwise impermeable barrier into the brain, directly into a tumor.”

Using a virus to kill cancer isn’t just the stuff of horror movies — it’s been an active branch of research for some time now. And to be fair, it seems to be a promising avenue of research in some cases; VSV (above) kills cancer in approximately two-thirds of patients. Of course, the downside is that VSV is a relative of rabies, and certainly researchers must take care that the virus is carefully modified so as not to trigger a rabies-like infection in the patient; curing cancer is nice and all, but in general it’s a good idea not to give people a potentially deadly viral infection in the process.

And unfortunately, I just don’t have the trust I used to have for scientific researchers, especially in medical fields.