My 14 Year Old Son Has Brain Cancer -- Without Obamacare, We May Have Been Dropped By Our Insurance Company

My then 13-year-old son would have reached his lifetime limit of health insurance had such limits not been eliminated by Obamacare on April 1, 2011.

This originally appeared on Janine Urbaniak's Open Salon blog. It was written in a response to a call for essays about people's personal experiences with the Affordable Care Act. Have an Obamacare story of your own? Blog about it on Open Salon.

Mason is my 14-year-old son, who is adorable and funny, and happens to have a very stubborn and large brain tumor. We discovered the tumor four years ago, and we have been monitoring and treating it with the help of some of the finest doctors around. Mason has lived a somewhat “normal” life, despite frequent MRIs and even chemotherapy. He did his homework and hung out with friends until the fall of 2010 when his headaches became debilitating. Scans revealed that Mason’s tumor had grown for the first time since we had discovered it. Then days before we were scheduled to meet with the neurosurgeon to discuss a surgery we had tried to avoid, Mason had a massive cerebral hemorrhage.   READ MORE

Sandra Fluke Affair Proves that it's Right-Wingers Who Are the True Adherents of Saul Alinsky

Saul Alinsky

Like most liberals under the age of 50, I've never actually read Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. I only know what the book is about from reading Right-wing blogs -- they're obsessed with Alinksy, and seem to think that studying him is mandatory in our Liberal Indoctrination Centers public schools.

One of Alinsky's rules -- again, I know this because conservatives keep telling me -- is that you've got to: 'Pick the Target, Freeze It, Personalize It and Polarize It.' And that's exactly what Rush Limbaugh and his slut-shaming is about. Sandra Fluke, after all, is not a prominent figure on the national stage. She is a a young woman in law-school who testified about the experience of a friend who required birth control pills to battle cancer. And here she is, a target picked, frozen, personalized and polarized. 

Anyway, Rush must be wondering what all the fuss is about - after all, his outrageously vile comments about Fluke aren't more outrageous or vile than any of the other bile he spews everyday.

Yet, there is a backlash, as Kristen Gwynne noted in an earlier post. Pressure is being brought to bear on Limbaugh's advertisers, and companies don't like to have their brand associated with the worst kind of misogyny.

Also, this is kind of nice...  

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DNA Robot Kills Cancer Cells

Scientists using nanotechnology may have come
up with a new way to attack cancer cells like this
one.
(photo: Steve Gschmeissner/Science Photo Library)

By Alla Katsnelson, Scientific American/Nature

18 February 12

NA origami, a technique for making structures from DNA, may be more than just a cool design concept. It can also be used to build devices that can seek out and destroy living cells. [View a "DNA Origami" Slide Show.]

The nanorobots, as the researchers call them, use a similar system to cells in the immune system to engage with receptors on the outside of cells.

"We call it a nanorobot because it is capable of some robotic tasks," says Ido Bachelet, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and one of the authors of the study, which is published in the February 17 issue of Science. Once the device recognizes a cell, he explains, it automatically changes its shape and delivers its cargo.

The researchers designed the structure of the nanorobots using open-source software, called Cadnano, developed by one of the authors--Shawn Douglas, a biophysicist at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. They then built the bots using DNA origami. The barrel-shaped devices, each about 35 nanometers in diameter, contain 12 sites on the inside for attaching payload molecules and two positions on the outside for attaching aptamers, short nucleotide strands with special sequences for recognizing molecules on the target cell. The aptamers act as clasps: once both have found their target, they spring open the device to release the payload.

"You can think about it as a sort of combination lock," says Bachelet. "Only when both markers are in place, can the entire robot open."

The researchers tested six combinations of aptamer locks, each of which were designed to target different types of cancer cells in culture. Those designed to hit a leukemia cell could pick that cell out of a mixture of cell types then release their payload--in this case, an antibody--to stop the cells from growing. They also tested payloads that could activate the immune system.

The work "takes us one more step along the path from the smartest drugs of today to the kind of medical nanobots we might imagine," says Paul Rothemund, a computational bioengineer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and inventor of DNA origami.   READ MORE