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A.
One Step Beyond 'Smart Bomb Therapy'
Narrator:
This is Science Today. For roughly a century, one
of the goals in medicine had been to use radioactivity
to target and irradiate tumors. It's only been recently
that the FDA approved a cancer therapy that uses
this technique, which is called smart bomb therapy.
Claude Meares, a professor of chemistry at the University
of California, Davis explains how it works.
Meares:
If you want to deliver radiotherapy to a cancer and
not to normal a very nice way to do that is to use
an antibody, load that antibody up with something
that will deliver radiation and allow it to float
through the body until it finds a cancer cell and
stick there and irradiate the cell.
Narrator:
Meares is working on a technique that goes a step
beyond this concept.
Meares:
What we do is use antibodies, but we don't load
them up with radiation. We load them up with a receptor
molecule that is not radioactive and doesn't irradiate
any normal tissue.
Narrator:
For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
B.
Measuring Social Status and Disease
Narrator:
This is Science Today. Physical and emotional health
are known to be affected by social relationships,
but a University of California, San Francisco psychologist
has found that more specifically, there's an important
link between one's perceived social status and their
health. Nancy Adler helped develop a tool designed
to measure how people perceive their social status.
Adler: What we've created was
literally a social ladder. We showed people a ladder
with ten rungs and said - imagine everyone in US society
is somewhere on this ladder, that people at the top
are the best off. They have the most income, the best
jobs, most education. People at the bottom are the
worst off - where would you place yourself?
Narrator: Where people placed themselves
correlated to a number of physical and mental health
indicators, including susceptibility to the common
cold. Adler also used this scale to link adolescents'
perception of their social status to obesity and depression.
Adler:
So the question of how early on this gets socialized
and how you can help kids develop a better sense of
themselves.
Narrator:
For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
C.
How Good is Your Sense of Smell?
Narrator:
This is Science Today. How good is your sense of smell?
Chances are -you may not be the best judge. Noam Sobel,
a neuroscientist at the University of California,
Berkeley, conducts olfactory studies and says people
often have a poor appreciation of their own sense
of smell.
Sobel:
We'll have people walk into lab and say 'oh,
I'm like a rat, I can sniff out anything' and we'll
test them and they'll actually be in terms of threshold,
average. And in turn we'll have people come into the
lab and say, 'oh, I can't smell a thing'. We'll test
them and they'll be keen as a bat.
Narrator:
Sobel says the reason for these olfactory discrepancies
ties in to how people actually use the information
coming from their nose to their brain.
Sobel:
It's almost saying like the differences between people
in this respect are largely attentional-or to some
extent attentional. There are people who pay a lot
of attention to olfaction.
Narrator:
Sobel recently conducted a study that found that
the ability to learn a new smell not only occurs in
the nose, but also in the brain. For Science Today,
I'm Larissa Branin.
D.
The Risks Involved with Smallpox Vaccination
Narrator:
This is Science Today. With global concerns about
a smallpox pandemic on the rise, experts researching
smallpox prevention are looking to the past to improve
options for the future. Epidemiologist Arthur Reingold
of the School of Public Health at the University of
California, Berkeley describes the risks involved
with smallpox vaccination.
Reingold:
The real complexity about vaccinating large numbers
of people against smallpox is that at least the old
vaccine we know caused substantial side effects in
people and not only at a predictable rate of mortality,
but substantial morbidity, that is to say illness,
some of which is quite serious.
Narrator:
Reingold
says that people can recover from many of the side
effects but the need for better vaccines and viral
treatments associated with smallpox is crucial.
Reingold:
The
old vaccine was made under conditions that today would
be considered extremely primitive. There already is
work underway to produce a much more modern smallpox
vaccine, and ultimately to produce enough doses for
the whole country.
Narrator:
For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
E.
Timing is Everything When a Heart Attack Strikes
Narrator:
This is Science Today. Previous studies have shown
that when symptoms of a heart attack strike, people
delay seeking treatment. But the longer one delays,
the more damage to the heart muscle. Kathleen Dracup
of the University of California, San Francisco's School
of Nursing, says unfortunately only twenty-five percent
of heart attack patients receive treatment within
the first two hours.
Dracup:
So the challenge for us as health professionals is
trying to help people be sensitive to their cardiac
symptoms and know what to do right away so that they
don't delay - they don't spend their time doing other
things - self treatment, taking Maalox, trying to
call their doctor, which is not the right thing to
do.
Narrator:
Dracup says it's equally important that families understand
what to do as well.
Hinshaw:
What we found they hope, like the patient, that this
isn't anything. And yet, the reality is - if it is
a heart attack, the best thing to do would be to come
immediately.
Narrator:
For
Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.
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