1. David Agus provides an excellent primer on what we talk about when we talk about cancer, criticizing a history of reductionism and offering the prospect of multidisciplinary systemic approach. Zing:
In healthcare we spend most of the dollars . . . treating disease, most of the dollars in the last two years of a person's life. We spend very little if any dollars . . . identifying what we're up against. If you could start to move that, to identify what you're up against, you're going to do a hell of a lot better. If we could even take it one step further and prevent disease, we could take it enormously in the other direction, and, obviously, that's where we need to go. . . .
2. Bill Doyle introduces the promising "fourth modality" of cancer treatment: targeted electric fields, which inhibit mitosis, leading to cancer cell death.
3. Finally, as a sort of counterweight to the foregoing somewhat staid cancer talks, please find Juice Media's The Rap News (with Robert Foster).
I first became aware of The Rap News at episode 7 featuring a parodied Asma Mahfouz offering insight into the Wisconsin public-sector strike, last March (See the real Asma Mahfouz - Tahrir square activist célèbre - interviewed on the occasion of her October visit to Occupy Wall Street at Democracy Now!), and I just found them again. They are often hilarious, occasionally insightful, and have spectacular rhymes with frequently-interesting flow, often all at the same time, as you'll see in the Special Report on the prospects of 2012, below (although, the mc chomsky cameo has little humor or flow to speak of).