© 2004 by Oxford University Press
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
© 2004 Oxford University Press
NEWS |
New Gene Discoveries May Boost DNA Stool Testing for Colorectal Cancer
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
In 1991, Johns Hopkins molecular geneticist Bert Vogelstein, M.D., approached his postdoc David Sidransky, M.D., with a startling proposal: Would Sidransky be willing to look for cancerous DNA mutations—in human feces? "This project sounded almost insane to me at the time," recalled Sidransky at the 2004 annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research. No one knew in 1991 whether colon cancer DNA could even survive in stool, much less be detected, so Vogelstein’s idea sounded futile as well as revolting. "There weren’t that many people in the lab who wanted to work with stool," Sidransky said. "It made me wonder at the time about how much I wanted to do science."
| |||||||||||
In the end, Sidransky took on this formidable scientific and aesthetic challenge and, to his surprise, succeeded. In work reported in Science in April 1992, he found K-ras mutations in the stool of
Obstructions to Progress
Relief Ahead?
The Challenges