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May 16, 2005
Death is the one thing we all share.
The article says:
"In death, Jannette Gonzalez finally has the leopard couch and the Chihuahua that she dreamed of having. Her daughter-in-law, Sophia Castaneda of Daly City, created a skeleton figure of Gonzalez, clad in a red lace dress, reclining on the sofa. Born in Hong Kong, Castaneda learned about the Day of the Dead from Gonzalez, 54, who died last year from a brain hemorrhage."
We should honour the dead, whilst we remember that 1 in 3 will be afflicted with cancer.
Promises that cancer could be cured provided much of the cultural meaning and nearly all of the commonwealth funding for the modern war on cancer, launched some two decades ago. The search for a cancer cure re-flected the belief that the disease arises chiefly from discrete external entities that can be attacked and eradicated.
Are things changing? is the the war on cancer reinventing itself as the quest for defective genes: cancer is genetic in origin, arising from mutations in the basic building blocks of cells that lead to unregulated growth.
Surely, only a relatively small portion of most dominant types of cancer is inherited.
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