Search Results for: Nature

Has Carl June Found a Key to Fighting Cancer?

Longreads Pick

They once struggled for funding. Now, Carl June and researchers at the University of Pennsylvania are drawing attention for a trial that uses gene therapy—engineered T cells—to fight cancer:

“In their natural state, T cells usually aren’t able to kill tumor cells, partly because they can’t latch on strongly enough. But June was fascinated by scientific papers showing it was possible to change this. A few researchers—first an Israeli named Zelig Eshhar in the ’80s, then other investigators around the world—had discovered that you could force a T cell to stick to a tumor cell and kill it. To pull this off, you built an ‘engineered T cell’—a T cell never before seen in nature. You altered the T cell’s genetic blueprint by injecting a new gene into the cell. The new gene would tell it to build a new molecular limb. The limb, called a ‘chimeric antigen receptor,’ would sit partly inside the cell and partly outside, and it could send signals either in or out. One signal it could send was: kill. Another was: replicate.

“June loved this approach. So elegant. Put the immune system on steroids. What if you could train the body to fight cancer on its own? What if, instead of replacing a patient’s immune system (as in a bone-marrow transplant) or pumping him full of poison (chemo), you could just borrow some cells, tweak them, and infuse them back into the patient? In theory, the engineered cells would stay alive in the blood, replenishing themselves, killing any tumors that recurred. It occurred to June that one infusion could last a lifetime.”

Published: Aug 14, 2013
Length: 36 minutes (9,145 words)

How Athletes Get Great

Longreads Pick

How much of greatness is nature vs. nurture? Sports Illustrated writer David Epstein challenges Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours” rule in a new book about the science of training, The Sports Gene. A lot depends on individual biology, and there are cultural factors, too:

“Usain Bolt is a great example. He was 6’4” when he was 15 years old and blazing fast. He wanted to play soccer or cricket. What are the chances anyone lets him run track in the U.S.? To me, it’s zero. There’s no way he’s not playing basketball or football. Nowhere but Trinidad, the Bahamas, Barbados, and Jamaica would a guy that’s 6’4”, with blinding speed, be allowed to run track instead of something else. People have asked me, ‘Should we do genetic screening for the best athletes or at least some sort of measurements?’ Yes, measuring kids and trying to fit them into the right sport for their body type absolutely works. That’s why you saw Australia and Great Britain up their medal haul with their talent search programs when they had their Olympics. However, when there’s a sport that’s most popular in an area, you don’t have to do that because you already have the natural sifting program. You don’t have to go hunt for the best football players in America because they’re already going to go play football and then we select them.”

Source: Outside
Published: Aug 9, 2013
Length: 21 minutes (5,302 words)

How Much Is a Life Worth?

Longreads Pick

A profile of Ken Feinberg, who has assisted in determining how to dole out funds for the victims of 9/11, the Boston Marathon bombing, the Newtown shooting, and the BP oil spill. The story raises larger questions about when we give to victims of tragedies, and when we don’t and why:

“All of this raises fundamental questions of fairness, he says. On one hand, the 9/11 payout was an expression of political sentiment; few Americans objected. And as far as private money goes, well, that’s the marketplace in action. Donors are free to send checks in one case and not another, just like they’re free to choose between the Jerry Lewis telethon and the March of Dimes. On the other hand is the unsettling feeling that human life ends up being valued in all manner of disparate ways, based on publicity, geography, the nature of the crime, and the identities of the victims. ‘It’s horrible,’ Feinberg says. A woman who lost a spouse in the Boston bombings will receive more than $2 million. A family who lost a child at Sandy Hook Elementary will see less than $300,000. Meanwhile, the families of African-American children killed by stray bullets on the streets of Chicago, Washington, New Orleans, and elsewhere may not be able to cover the cost of the funeral.”

Published: Aug 1, 2013
Length: 18 minutes (4,602 words)

How a Convicted Murderer Prepares for a Job Interview

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Sabine Heinlein | University of California Press | 2013 | 25 minutes (6,132 words)

Our latest Longreads Member Pick is a full chapter from Among Murderers: Life After Prison, by Sabine Heinlein.

Heinlein is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer who spent more than two years at the Castle, a prominent halfway house in Harlem, where she met convicts who were preparing for the outside world.  Read more…

Our Longreads Member Pick: The Prophet, by Luke Dittrich and Esquire

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For this week’s Member Pick, we’re excited to share “The Prophet,” the much-talked-about new story from Luke Dittrich and Esquire magazine investigating the claims made by Dr. Eben Alexander in the best-selling book Proof of Heaven, about Alexander’s own near-death experience.

Dittrich, a contributing editor at Esquire since 2008, has been featured on Longreads many times in the past and his work has appeared in anthologies including The Best American Crime WritingThe Best American Travel Writing, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and his article about a group of strangers who sheltered together during a devastating tornado won the 2012 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. He is currently writing a book for Random House about his neurosurgeon grandfather’s most famous patient, Henry Molaison, an amnesiac from whom medical science learned most of what it knows about how memory works.

Read an excerpt here. 

Become a Longreads Member to receive the full ebook. 

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Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Our Longreads Member Pick: The Prophet, by Luke Dittrich and Esquire

Longreads Pick

For this week’s Member Pick, we’re excited to share “The Prophet,” the much-talked-about new story from Luke Dittrich and Esquire magazine investigating the claims made by Dr. Eben Alexander in the best-selling book Proof of Heaven, about Alexander’s own near-death experience.

Dittrich, a contributing editor at Esquire since 2008, has been featured on Longreads many times in the past and his work has appeared in anthologies including The Best American Crime WritingThe Best American Travel Writing, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and his article about a group of strangers who sheltered together during a devastating tornado won the 2012 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. He is currently writing a book for Random House about his neurosurgeon grandfather’s most famous patient, Henry Molaison, an amnesiac from whom medical science learned most of what it knows about how memory works.

Read an excerpt here. 

Become a Longreads Member to receive the full ebook. 

Source: Esquire
Published: Jul 23, 2013
Length: 42 minutes (10,525 words)

Reading List: Sunrise, Sunset

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Emily Perper is a freelance editor and reporter, currently completing a service year in Baltimore with the Episcopal Service Corps.

A few weeks ago, I was reading my weekly horoscope, courtesy of The Rumblr’s Madame Clairvoyant. The last three words of Leo’s outlook caught in my mind: “Don’t even worry.”

“Don’t even worry,” I whispered over and over. So many people have told me not to worry about the future in one breath, only to interrogate me about my future plans in the next. “Don’t even worry,” I say to myself. These are pieces that make me feel hopeful about the future — not in the naive hope that it will be easy, but with calm assurance that good things will happen to mediate the bad.

1. “The ‘Handicap Icon’ Gets New Life.” (Jennifer Grant, Christianity Today, June 2013)

A philosophy professor and an artist collaborated to create a “symbol of access,” angered by the stigma and ignorance directed toward differently abled citizens.

2. “The Empty-Nest Yard Sale.” (Kevin Sampsell, The Rumpus, June 2013)

Sampsell, a bookseller and independent publisher, considers his son’s teenage tendency toward aloofness and his own desperate, emotional response.

3. “Internship From Hell.” (Michael McGuire, The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2013)

Once an intern at El Nuevo Heraldo in Miami, McGuire’s internship sums up a lot of what today’s working youth face: disgust, exhaustion, disillusionment, bouts of hysterical laughter and sweet relief at the end of it all.

4. “Slouching Towards Babylon.” (Anna McConnell, Rookie Magazine, June 2013)

Her hippie peers sneer at her New York upbringing, and sometimes, she does, too. But nature’s sublimity is no match for homesickness.

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Illustration by Kim

‘My Body Stopped Speaking to Me’: The First-Person Account of a Near-Death Experience

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Our recent Longreads Member Pick by National Magazine Award winner Andrew Corsello from GQ is now free for everyone. Special thanks to our Longreads Members for helping bring these stories to you—if you’re not a member, join us here.

“My Body Stopped Speaking to Me,” is a personal story about Corsello’s near-death experience, first published in GQ in 1995. Read more…

Black Plank

Longreads Pick

An essay about art and family:

“I had thought its blackness would be that of a black hole, whose point of no return sucks in color and light never to be seen again. But the ceiling lights shone in it like an assembly of suns, and the reflected hues of a Frank Stella collage in the room behind me gave it a bit of cheer. I felt awkward standing directly in front of it, unable to look at Black Plank without seeming to look at myself. You actually look into it, not at it, and therefore into yourself. This illusion of depth reminded me of Thoreau’s lake-as-earth’s-eye, ‘looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.’ Maybe our mirrors should be like this, I thought—a vehicle for soul-searching, just dark enough to be useless for applying lipstick or plucking gray hairs. The plank cast long, overlapping shadows on the wall behind it, narrow at the top and wider at the bottom, like an inverted paper fan beginning to open.”

Published: Jun 25, 2013
Length: 16 minutes (4,202 words)

Dragon Ladies

Longreads Pick

The writer reflects on the difficult relationship between her grandmother and mother, and how it has shaped her relationship with her mother:

“No wonder I’ve preferred not to think too much about what my grandmother and I share, but listening to all those eulogies, and spending three days with my mother in a tiny Swiss hotel room, I had to. She was Eurasian; I’m Eurasian. She was a writer; I’m a writer. In one of her memoirs, published when I was twelve, she writes, ‘Karen is so very much like me in some ways that it is almost unbelievable.’ What could she possibly have observed in pre-teen me to allow her to make that claim? Since her death, it’s occurred to me that those aspects of a mixed-race identity — her protean nature, her desire to control information and the narratives made from it — that served her have served me, and may have enabled the least appealing parts of ourselves. Turns out it’s not just my grandmother who deserves my ambivalence.”

Source: The Millions
Published: Jun 13, 2013
Length: 12 minutes (3,008 words)