Items related to Dr. Folkman's War: Angiogenesis and the Struggle...
Synopsis
In 1961, twenty-eight-year-old Dr. Judah Folkman saw something while doing medical research in a United States navy lab that gave him the first glimmering of a wild, inspired hunch. What if cancerous tumors, in order to expand, needed to trigger the growth of new blood vessels to feed themselves? And if that was true, what if a way could be found to stop that growth? Could cancers be starved to death?
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Review
Early in 1998, New York Times science reporter and author Gina Kolata happened to be seated at a banquet next to the Nobel Prize-winning scientist James Watson. When Kolata asked Watson what was new in the world of science, he replied, "Judah Folkman and angiogenesis, that's what's new. Judah is going to cure cancer in two years".
Folkman, a long-time physician and medical researcher at Harvard University and Children's Hospital, was caught off guard by the excited news reports that followed Watson's remark, but there was good reason for excitement. For nearly four decades, when not busy doing such things as inventing the heart pacemaker and attending to hundreds of patients, Folkman had been puzzling out a peculiarity of tumours: at some point during their formation, they sent forth chemical signals that in effect "recruited" blood vessels to feed them. If those signals could be intercepted through well-targeted drugs, Folkman reasoned, and the blood supply to cancerous formations thus interrupted, then the tumours themselves might be starved to death, or at least to dormancy.
In this book, Newsday writer Robert Cooke offers an accessible account of Folkman's work on angiogenesis, or the formation of blood vessels, which may well point the way to new treatments for cancer and related illnesses. Following Folkman's roundabout trail, one marked by considerable resistance on the part of doubtful colleagues, readers will gain a sense of how medical research is conducted--and, almost certainly, a sense of wonder at the medical breakthroughs that, as James Watson hinted, are just around the corner. --Gregory McNamee
About the Author
ROBERT COOKE, a native of Southern California, served four years in the coast guard before graduating from California State Polytechnic College and receiving a master's degree from UCLA a year later. Since then he has spent thirty-five years covering science and medicine for major newspapers, including The Boston Globe, The Atlantic journal and Constitution, and Newsday. His fascination with science news began with the advent of the space age and matured with continuing exposure to the biological sciences. His interests are wide-ranging and include molecular biology, genetics, geology, astronomy, and archaeology and anthropology.
Cooke has been with Newsday for fifteen years. He is married to the former Sue Bailey Cato, whom he met just before he entered high school, and they have three grown children-Gregory, Karen, and Emily. He lives in Huntington, Long Island, New York.
From the Hardcover edition.
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- PublisherDiane Pub Co
- Publication date2003
- ISBN 10 0756756952
- ISBN 13 9780756756956
- BindingHardcover
- LanguageEnglish
- Number of pages366
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