James Watson – “Unless we can find ways of reducing antioxidant levels, late-stage cancer 10 years from now will be as incurable as it is today,”
Excerpted from January 9, 2013, genengnews.com,
James Watson Hypothesis Links Cancer to Antioxidants
In a paper, he called “among my most important work since the double helix,” James D. Watson. Ph.D., posited a theory that links cancer progression in late stages of the disease to the presence of antioxidants.
The paper was published today in Open Biology, a journal of Great Britain’s Royal Society. According to the DNA co-discoverer and chancellor emeritus of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, reactive oxygen species (ROS) pose a dichotomy: They play a positive role in mediating the killing of stressed cells during apoptosis. But when no such cells exist, however, ROS’s are constantly being neutralized by antioxidative proteins, causing irreversible damage to DNA and RNA among key nucleic acid molecules and proteins.
Bio info from the BBC,
Nobel Prize-winning American scientist James Watson has been stripped of his honorary titles after repeating comments about race and intelligence.
In a TV programme, the pioneer in DNA studies made a reference to a view that genes cause a difference on average between blacks and whites on IQ tests.
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory said the 90-year-old scientist’s remarks were “unsubstantiated and reckless”.
Dr Watson had made similar claims in 2007 and subsequently apologised.
He shared the Nobel in 1962 with Maurice Wilkins and Francis Crick for their 1953 discovery of the DNA’s double helix structure.
Continuing:
In his latest paper, Dr. Watson theorized that the cell-killing ability of current anticancer therapies—from radiation to Taxol and other chemotherapeutic agents—occurs mainly due to the induction of apoptosis by ROS…
High levels of ROS-destroying antioxidants, Dr. Watson added, accounts for cancer cells largely driven by mutant proteins being among the hardest to produce a response via treatment.
Bigtime Science Editor Nicoletta Lanese neglects to include crucial link to James Watson’s research
In a 13-paragraph article, dated June 27, writer Nicoletta Lanese gives no credit to Dr. Watson for his original research on the link. Similarly, the two leading researchers, Martin Bergö, a biologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden and Michele Pagano, a cancer biologist at the NYU School of Medicine, do not credit Dr. Watson.
From ScienceNews.org, June 27
Antioxidants may encourage the spread of lung cancer rather than prevent it
Antioxidants, once touted as a cancer preventive, may actually spur the disease’s spread. Now scientists have figured out how.
Whether taken as a dietary supplement or produced by the body, antioxidants appear to help lung cancer cells invade tissues beyond the chest cavity, two studies report online June 27 in Cell.
More:
Now knowing how antioxidants exacerbate cancer, scientists may be able to undermine the mechanism with drugs…
“Understanding why some cancers metastasize and some don’t is one of the biggest problems in lung cancer right now,” says Roy Herbst, a medical oncologist at Yale Cancer Center.
https://twitter.com/RobertWargas/status/1144262413442834437
Note – Robert Wargas has written for the Catholic Herald, Weekly Standard, The Spectator and PJ Media.
Bio info from LiveScience:
I’m the health channel editor for Live Science, a science news website aimed at the general public that reaches approximately 205 million readers a year.
I commission, edit, report and write dozens of news articles each month to keep our readers informed about the latest medical studies, drug discoveries and disease outbreaks. In addition, our evergreen stories aim to demystify common questions about how the human body works, as well as what can happen when those inner workings go awry. From short-form news to features, my guiding principle is to make the often daunting worlds of medicine and human biology as accessible as possible, without shying away from nuance.
How ironic, Dr. Watson is stripped of his honorariums, prizes, titles and now it appears he’s being blatantly plagiarized. Was this the plan all along? Give the credit for his findings to other academics and researchers? Even affirmative action to replace Watson, the dreaded “white male”?
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