Cancer Breakthrough Cure
Food Chain Radio Show #1174
Michael Olson, Author & Urban Farming Agriculturalist
Immunological Breakthrough Cure for Cancer
Guest: Charles Graeber, Author, The Breakthrough: Immunology and The Race To Cure Cancer
Most all of us know someone who was eaten up by cancer. As it did, we most likely stood by and watched helplessly as the doctors cut, burned and poisoned away at the nasty beast, but in the end, could only shed tears of helplessness.
Michael Olson Food Chain Radio – Can our bodies be made to be the cure for cancer? Guest: Charles Graeber, Author, The Breakthrough: Immunology and The Race To Cure Cancer. Image La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology.
And that is the way it has been for as long as anybody can remember. But recently there has been a breakthrough in the way we fight the cellular monster. Instead of cutting, burning and poisoning it, we have been learning how to train our bodies to fight it… to become immune to it.
I have watched this fight take place in a good friend who was being eaten up by a particularly pernicious cancer. There was not much hope for her. But then she was given what they called an experimental therapy in which they extracted some of her blood, sent it away to a distant lab where it was infused with some warrior cells, and then returned to her body. Last week she was playing on the beach in Hawaii.
And by a recent discovery, I mean very recent. In fact, the Pulitzer Prize winning book Emperor of Maladies, which was published in 2010, makes no mention of the medical field of immunology. And yet here we are, a few years later, teaching our bodies how to fight off the rogue cells, and increasingly, walking away from the ravenous monster.
The story begins with the discovery of “checkpoint inhibitors,” which essentially, are like the body’s border guards. To tell that story, we have the man who wrote the story. And so we’ll ask him our question of the day, which is …
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Nationally syndicated Food Chain Radio airs live Saturday mornings 9-10AM Pacific.
