Explaining Unexplained

Till the other day any report on ability of Yoga, healthy lifestyle curing ailments brought anything but ridicule and disbelief from people who appeared to know more. Slowly, people have started accepting that for many diseases, it is better than taking medicines. There were some reports (e.g. Baba Ramdev's camp, one in US being detected cancer was given six months lifetime and after fun-filled six months he finds that he is cured) that even the dreaded of all diseases cancer can be cured which is not possible by any human made medicine. That perhaps hurt our ego like anything. Now, it is heartening to note the following development coming from an India born scholar. We may find around us two distinct type of things - man made and nature/God(give it any name) made. While we may show greater amount of confidence on man made things (though side effects are known much later which often has proven to be counter productive), we can be humble in explaining other things - to say that we understand only this much as on today. Exploration, evidence collection and drawing inferences is a long process and till that time it is unscientific to reject any hypothesis that comes from someone's experience. Outliers need not be noise. In fact, it can provide vital clue in our attempt to explain the unexplained.

From Times News Network : July 25, 2009

Body secretes its own cancer-busting protein Kounteya Sinha | TNN New Delhi: Last year, he hit the headlines for creating the world’s first breed of super mice, which are resistant to all forms of cancer. Now, Mumbai-born and US-settled Dr Vivek Rangnekar, professor of radiation medicine at the University of Kentucky, has in another breakthrough discovered that the Par-4 protein (a mass killer of cancer cells) is produced within the human body itself and spreads through circulation to distant organs. This finding will now help scientists look at ways to naturally increase the secretion of the protein, for example, by certain natural diets and develop resistance to the growth of cancer. Scientists can also develop approaches to safely inject the Par-4 protein to inhibit cancer. The team headed by Dr Rangnekar has also found that the Par-4 protein is capable of killing cancer cells, when applied from outside. Till this discovery, scientists believed that Par-4 protein has to be present inside cancer cells to kill them. Since it isn’t easy to deliver large amounts of the protein inside cancer cells, scientists have been studying other methods to target and kill cancer cells. Par-4, after being secreted by human tissues, has also been found to kill only cancer cells. It didn’t harm normal cells, proving they aren't toxic. The presence of large amounts of the Par-4 protein in the super mice had made them completely immune to cancer. Not only did they not develop tumours, they even lived longer. According to Dr Rangnekar, who is associate director of the University of Kentucky’s Markey Cancer Center, what these findings mean for the future is that it may not be necessary to use invasive or genetic approaches to inhibit the growth of cancer.