He is the one who asked that the her2group advocate for change to the medical privacy laws as they apply to cancer research. An easier way to accomplish the same thing would be for all the participants on this site to give permission to utilize a tiny portion of their surgical specimens for his research and wave their rights to privacy--wouldn't you want to know what genes and proteins and receptors are on YOUR individual tumors? Perhaps Cynthia can comment on the legality of all this, but the Wall St Journal article on the woman with the lung disease I posted within the last couple of weeks indicated she got others with her disease to donate material for the researchers to work on. Only very tiny amounts are necessary for microarray work, so there would be lots left over if better techniques become available to study your tumor later...
THIS article is written for the general public. The part about inflammatory signals causing the migration and division of stem cells(eg, after surgery) is especially well-described and thought-provoking. I await their theories on how radiation therapy alters the picture.
This article is REALLY WORTH THE EFFORT TO READ...and THINK about its consequences. Among the big questions in my mind are:
is her2 on the stem cells?
are ER and/or PR on the stem cells?
Here is the link(?):
http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...0A83414B7F0000
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