SAN FRANCISCO ‑ I’m enough of a geek that I actually enjoy the details, devil and all, and so I love covering scientific conferences. At the same time, they can be daunting. So much scientific progress is incremental. A case in point: This year’s conference handbook for the annual meeting of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD) comes to over 1,500 pages, most of them describing minor advances. As I sat in a San Francisco café Saturday morning, simultaneously soaking up the atmosphere and sifting through some of those abstracts in preparation for the weekend, though,...
Cancer is famous (and difficult to treat) because of the dizzying variation of genetic alterations that can cause it – tumors can acquire tens of thousands of mutations over the course of an individual patient's disease.Unfortunately, the cancer cell lines that are still one of the main research tools to study those genes do not illustrate the same pattern of gene expression as the cancers from which they are derived. That's the conclusion of a study published this week by scientists from the National Cancer Institute.The experiments, which were published in the Oct.
