[Leica] OT (very) The Great Prostate Debate: Does ScreeningSaveLives?: Scientific American And a bit more to think about

[leica_r8 at hotmail.com (Aram Langhans)]

I have enjoyed reading this thread.  The issue is important and also points 
out how our society reacts to science and medicine.  When I retired from 
teaching full time at the HS level, I started teaching a summer biology 
class for non-majors at the local community college.  It has been a lot of 
fun, and way different than my advanced high school classes.  A bit more 
than a year ago, my closest friend for about 30 years was diagnosed with 
brain cancer, and it was not good.  He was given a 20% chance of living 6 
months and he made 7.  But the last few he was essentially not there.  This 
was after aggressive rounds of chemo and radiation.  His wife, naturally so, 
was distraught with the diagnosis and the treatments.  She cared for him at 
home until he died, and she was also caring for her mother with dementia, 
who died 6 months later.  Lots of stress.

At times she would make comments akin to; we can land a man on the moon 
but....  We have all heard those kinds of statements.  It got me thinking, 
and I posed the following question to my science class last summer.  "What 
do you expect from science?"  It was an interesting discussion.  I was 
surprised.   I had previously tried this question on other friends and 
relations, and I got quite a lot of them expecting science to have a cure or 
solution for whatever ailed them, be it medical or technological.  There's a 
pill for that.  There's an ap for that...  So, I was expecting my class to 
put a lot of expectations into what they thought science could do, but in my 
class I did not get much of that.  Even though they were not science majors, 
most had a better idea of what science was all about than the general public 
in my previous sample.  But, then again, this was the best class I have had 
in the three years I have been teaching it.  I plan on using this again this 
summer, if I get a chance to teach the class again.   It points out that not 
many people really know what science can and cannot do, and how the process 
of science works.  How complex some things are, yet we tend to learn very 
oversimplified views in early science classes and the media certainly does 
not correct that view.  Gene for X discovered, cure around the corner.

The human genome project was supposed to answer all our questions.  Well, as 
any scientist knows, the more you learn, the more you don't know.  For every 
question you answer, it poses three or four more.  Now we are seeing the 
possible roles for all that so-called "junk DNA", and we are seeing the 
complex nature of RNA, gene regulation, epigenetics,  and the list goes on.

Sorry for my ranting.  I just thought it related to the issue of prostrate 
cancer.


Aram