New Hope for Battling Brain Cancer (preview)

March 11, 2010, 9:00 am by Scientific American: Health

In May 2006 Dwayne Berg woke up on a gurney in a Seattle emergency room, an IV in his arm and a team of doctors and nurses working him up. The last thing the 42-year-old financial executive could remember was running on a treadmill at his gym, part of his regular fitness regimen. He had suffered a seizure and tumbled off the machine, and although he had not hurt himself in the fall, doctors had asked for an MRI scan of his brain to see if they could find a cause for the seizure.They did, and the news was not good: the scan showed a large mass in the left frontal lobe that turned out to be a malignant glioma, a brain cancer that is almost invariably fatal. Berg underwent standard treatment: an operation to remove the tumor, followed by chemotherapy and radiation to eradicate any cancer cells that might remain. [More]

Read the full article

More from Scientific American: Health

Ancient Brewmasters Made Medicinal Beer
Scientific American: Health : September 6, 2010, 3:42 am
In 1980, a scientist looking at bone fragments under an ultraviolet microscope noticed the bones were glowing green--a hallmark of the antibiotic tetracycline. The drug latches onto calcium and gets deposited in

Mapping the Mind: Online Interactive Atlas Shows Activity of 20,000 Brain-Related Genes (preview)
Scientific American: Health : September 2, 2010, 10:00 am
Scientists have long sought to understand the biological basis of thought. In the second century A.D., physician and philosopher Claudius Galen held that the brain was a gland that secreted

Shaky Ground: Can Seismologists Be Charged with a Crime for Not Predicting Deadly Quakes?
Scientific American: Health : September 2, 2010, 9:00 am
The adage “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” does not quite capture the following pair of situations. It’s more like “damned if you could (but you can’t), damned if you

Rabbit Rest: Can Lab-grown Human Skin Replace Animals in Toxicity Testing?
Scientific American: Health : September 2, 2010, 1:10 am
It likely comes as no surprise that many common household chemicals and medical products as well as industrial and agricultural chemicals, may irritate human skin temporarily or, worse, cause permanent,

Toxic avenger: One man's desperate idea to save the rhinos--poison their horns
Scientific American: Health : September 1, 2010, 12:00 pm
With rhinoceros poaching in Africa approaching an all-time high , one nature preserve owner has had enough. Ed Hern, owner of the Rhino and Lion Nature Reserve near