Speed Reading of DNA May Help Cancer Treatment

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4580875n

Key Ideas:

• Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have developed a way to monitor the progress of a patient’s cancer treatment using a new technique for sequencing large amounts of DNA.
• The DNA rearrangements are unique to cancer cells, making them a very specific marker.
• More than 80 percent of cancers had mutations in their mitochondrial DNA.
• The proportion of variant mitochondrial DNA in healthy people tended to vary quite widely from one kind of tissue to another.
• If two mitochondrial DNA sequences differ by a single unit, current guidelines require the analyst to report the comparison as inconclusive.

Reflection:

I thought this article was pretty boring. Even though it is a scientific breakthrough, I feel like there are too many. I mean, it's cool that science has come so far, but something seems off. It's good that these scientists are relating their discoveries to outside of the scientific world and using them to further research in other areas. By doing this, ideas get passed back and forth, and that will most likely lead to another discovery. The cycle seems like it's unending. This course helped me to understand this topic because we studied DNA and cancer.

MLA: Wade, Nicholas. "Speed Reading of DNA May Help Cancer Treatment." The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia. 08 Mar. 2010. Web. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/09/science/09gene.html.