You may have noticed there have been quite a lot of cancer related stories in the news this week. There is a reason for this. Every year there is a big conference, organised by the NCRI, the National Cancer Research Institute. The NCRI is a partnership of government, charities and industry. They oversee research to make sure that work isn’t being duplicated (i.e being done by two different labs at opposite ends of the country) and help coordinate clinical trials. You can read more about the NCRI here.
Many of this weeks news stories have come from results presented at the NCRI 2009 conference, which was held in Birmingham from the 4-7th October. There is a video introduction to the conference here. Even if you didn’t go to the conference, you can still find out about the research by watching their online videos. You’ll need a broadband connection and the latest version of Flash (Flash 8), to view the videos. Flash is a free download. Each video is a couple of minutes long (it’s not the full lecture) but gives you a good overview of the latest research, you don’t need to be a scientist to understand most of them (!).
Cancer Research UK’s Science Update blog has several posts about the conference, so that’s a good place to look for further information. If you prefer to listen to your news rather than read it, the Naked Scientists podcast this week is live from the NCRI conference. The Q&A section at the end of the transcript is particularly interesting, I learnt that elephants have very solid leg bones and that most of their red blood cells are produced in their pelvis (!) In you and me, a lot of our red blood cells are made inside the bone marrow of our leg bones (femur). That doesn’t have anything to do with cancer, but there is lots of information on new treatments and research into new drugs.
Anyway, do you think large conferences are a good idea? What is the best way to share information between cancer research scientists, doctors and patients? Please leave a comment below. Thanks
If you are more impressed with the images than the text “
[...] that there had been a lot of cancer stories in the news this week as there had been a large cancer conference in Birmingham. You may have noticed a lot of science stories too, this is because the winners of [...]