Word: patient
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Congress pass a patient's bill of rights?" he asked. "Because Democrats are gridlocked by trial lawyers who want everybody to sue everybody for everything, and Republicans are gridlocked by insurance companies and HMOs who give huge amounts of money." Soon he's rumbling through the domestic agenda like a tank. "The tax code is 44,000 pages long--why can't we reform it? Because of the grip of the special interests." He even applies his worldview to the G.O.P.'s $792 billion tax cut, which Clinton vetoed in September. "It included special tax breaks...
GENE BLUES Gene therapy has been going through a rough patch lately. First, a young patient died in the middle of his gene-therapy trial. And last week the Washington Post reported that half a dozen heart patients have died while undergoing a different form of gene therapy. These patients were already desperately ill, however, and it's not clear that the treatments had anything to do with their death. Gene therapy shows great promise, but anyone who is considering it should know that it's still very experimental...
...there will be drugs to trip up a cell at each of the steps it takes on the path to malignancy. A patient with lung cancer, say, might undergo gene therapy, breathing in genetically altered cold viruses that don't cause infection but instead act as miniature delivery vans carrying copies of the p53 gene. Good copies of this gene, which is mutated in many cancers, can force some cancer cells to commit suicide. The effects of p53 could be bolstered with antibodies that slow tumors by attaching to the surface of cancer cells and gumming up their ability...
...assumption behind many of these futuristic scenarios is an idea that most researchers have begun to embrace but that many patients will undoubtedly find difficult to accept. That is the prediction that certain cancers may require treatment for the rest of a patient's long life. Coming out of a century that declared war on the disease, a century that felt the only reasonable response to a tumor was to annihilate it, this may be hard to imagine. But turning cancer into a controllable condition is not so different from treating high blood pressure or diabetes. "I don't think...
TOMORROW: Breast may be grown in the lab from a patient's own fat cells and infused back through keyhole slits in the chest...