It has been nearly four months since I’ve posted to The Cancer Chronicles, and during that time I’ve completed a pretty solid draft of six chapters — approximately a third to a half of the book. I also traveled to Cambridge, England, for a seminar on Science and Islam, and then to London, where I interviewed two researchers at Imperial College. One of them, Jeremy Nicholson, is working at the forefront of the effort to understand the microbiome and how it is involved in cancer. It’s an astonishing thought: that the cells that make up our tissues and organs can exchange molecular signals with the unicellular microbes that inhabit us. It is commonly said that 90 percent of the cells in our body are, in fact, microbial — we’re outnumbered 10 to 1. Even more striking, Dr. Nicholson estimated that more than 99 percent of the working genes in the human body are within this horde of tiny creatures. With signals flying back and forth between the two domains, the implications for cancer and other diseases are just beginning to be unraveled. I’ve described a little about this work and other cutting edge cancer research in an article for Science Times: Cancer’s Secrets Come Into Sharper Focus.
As I get deeper into the manuscript and closer to publication — still probably two years away — I expect to increase the pace of these dispatches. Meanwhile I thank you for occasionally tuning in.
