High school student researches cancer

(Aug. 4, 2008. Correction: The drug Ranti used was not Phenoxodiol; it was another experimental drug.)

Ranti Odujinrin of Altadena will begin her senior year at Polytechnic School in the fall. She is one of 80 high school and college students selected from 600 applicants for the City of Hope’s Summer Student Academy. Ranti is working on a breast cancer treatment experiment and wrote the following about her internship:

(Above, interns visit the California Science Center)

While most of my friends took part in language immersion programs in Argentina or summer school at Columbia University, I spent the summer working as an intern at the City of Hope. I have been lucky enough to work in the molecular medicine lab under the guidance of my principal investigator, Dr. Edward Newman, and my mentor, Doris Villacorte.

In my most recent experiment, I was given a flask of breast cancer cells to grow and maintain at a count of 100,000 cells in each well before adding a drug. The objective was to add different concentrations of PxD (Phenoxodiol), a drug used to kill cancer cells, to test which was the most effective. Over the course of a week I drugged, harvested, and counted breast cancer cells, noting whether the cells grew or died. I graphed the cell growth of each concentration and presented the information to Dr. Newman. As expected in science, the results do not always come out as we hope or expect, and my experiment was no exception. So today, I will start over, re-drugging, re-harvesting and re-counting, although this time I’ll have another week of experience under my belt.

Not all of my time is spent working with Bunsen burners and Erlenmeyer flasks. We recently saw Body Worlds 3 at the California Science Center. Seeing the human body in its natural form, with every muscle, ligament and artery of the preserved cadavers exposed, I reached a new insight of how truly astonishing our bodies are. Witnessing an actual wrist with advanced arthritis or a liver with cirrhosis takes these medical conditions to a different level of intimacy. My favorite was the figure-skating pair. Initially drawn to its sheer beauty, I found myself staring, astounded by the tension of the flexed muscle required for the graceful position.

As the Summer Student Academy is winding to an end, I am excited about what's ahead, such as the poster session, an opportunity for all students to display their work. I also look forward to maintaining these friendships as I begin the college admissions process and start a career in disease research.

Comments

[Jon Harms]

I enjoyed reading your article very much. I am a breast cancer survivor of four years. I had a modified radical and lymph node involvement. After six months of chemo and eight weeks of radiation, I am happy to say my initial stage 3 cancer is no longer present. I am pleased to see a young person like yourself show so much enthusiasm in her learning, especially when it would be easy to be lounging at the beach during the summer. Continue your good work knowing that your research is the key to finding the cure to a disease that affects both men and women.

[Winfield J. Abbe]

It sounded like your cancer cells were not being kept under human body conditions. Such experiments have led to many false conclusions in the past. I urge you to read about the genius in Germany Otto Warburg, M.D., Ph.D.(1883-1970) He was nominated for 3 Nobel Prizes in medicine for 3 different pieces of work! He invented a machine to measure intercellular oxygen pressure. He also invented the tissue slice technique. He found that when he reduced oxygen pressure by about one third on animal tissue, it became cancerous in about 1923. About 40 years later he proved it for humans too. Cancer is a disease of respiratory deficiency but the orthodoxy denies and obstructs this. He concluded that cancer is caused by the wrong energy supply, fermentation. Only oxygen energy can sustain cell differentiation of higher living forms.
See "The Hidden Story of Cancer" by Brian Peskin E.E. and Amid Habib, M.D., Pinnacle Press, Houston, 2008, first published 2006.
Also read "The Truth about Hydrazine Sulfate-Dr. Gold Speaks" by Joseph Gold, M.D., www.hydrazinesulfate.org.
Best wishes. Try not to become brainwashed by those whom you work for. They have squandered billions of dollars on genetics research and got nowhere. Obviously they are barking up the wrong tree.

Winfield J. Abbe, Ph.D., Physics
UC Riverside, 1966
Athens, GA