WATTENBERG AT LARGE: Medical
WATTENBERG AT LARGE: Medical
Ben Wattenberg At Large Heroes in Medicine
WATTENBERG AT LARGE: Medical
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WATTENBERG AT LARGE: Medical
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WATTENBERG AT LARGE: Medical
Statue of Albert Einstein at the National Academy of Sciences pan to Ben Wattenberg says that there is a cultural decline in the prominence of heroic figures / heroes. This show will be on heroes in medicine
WATTENBERG AT LARGE: Medical
Opening titles
WATTENBERG AT LARGE: Medical
Ben Wattenberg interviews Dr. Lewis Thomas, Chancellor Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, I grew up in a doctor s family. My father was a general practitioner of what is now called the old school. He graduated from medical school in New York in 1905 at the time of one of the great upheavals in medicine. Therapy had been abandoned. The use of bleeding and purging and botanical extracts of all kinds had been given up. And the only science that existed and had any effect on what he did with his professional life was in the process of making an accurate diagnosis. But he used to tell me over and over again, that he did not believe that anything that he had to offer from the black bad that he carried around on house calls had any measurable effect on illness. I was a medical student and a house officer in the mid and later 1937s when the second big upheaval occurred, and that was the introduction of first sulfonamide and then penicillin and the other antibiotics. In my father s day, it was expected that some members of every family would die at an early age. The thing that was most frightening, in somewhat the same sense that cancer is frightening today, was tuberculosis. There was absolutely nothing to be done about it. Tertiary syphilis was the other major illness feared by everybody and it was the cause of more insanity than any other disease. And in my own lifetime, since medical school, I ve been a bystander watching the upheaval that continues to go on today which I think is revolutionizing medicine. And that is the acquiring, piece by piece of some understanding of how disease really works. And I think now and in 1981, we re on the verge of a period where we really can examine at very close quarters disease mechanisms thanks to the biological science that s been accumulated in the last 25 years.
WATTENBERG AT LARGE: Medical
Ben Wattenberg, Dr. Fredrickson, you re out of the National Institute of Health. I wonder if you could perhaps go through for us some of the items of research that are on this cutting edge of knowledge that Dr. Thomas was talking about. What s going on out there? What are you up to? Dr. Donald S. Fredrickson former director of National Institute of Health, Cardiologists and the surgeons have fought out a war in a sort of friendly fashion and have made the heart, which was once an inviolate organ, fully accessible. And they have brought down a tremendous change in mortality and incidents of coronary artery disease particularly, but also hypertension. Ben Wattenberg, That s still our number one killer. Dr. Donald S. Fredrickson Cardiovascular disease in some is still our number one killer. But the rate is falling everywhere and in every age group throughout the states and in some of the other countries in the world now.
WATTENBERG AT LARGE: Medical
An operating room with patient, surgeons, IV drip, and close up of insertion of an angioplasty into a coronary artery. C/U of the angioplasty device being threaded into the chest through a catheter. Shot of magnified micro-optic image of the BLOOD VESSELS showing the angioplasty being threaded to the artery and expanding.
WATTENBERG AT LARGE: Medical
Patient having tests. C/U of EKG and Heart Rate monitor printout graphs. Blood pressure readout on graph. Blood sample being taken. Shot of respirator. A blood pressure test on a man, using an inflating neck collar like the traditional inflating armband.
WATTENBERG AT LARGE: Medical
Sign on the wall Nuclear Medicine Diagnostic Imaging Section A young woman with small electrodes attached to her head, undergoing a test
WATTENBERG AT LARGE: Medical
A young woman undergoing a PET scan (Positron emission tomography). Doctors check a photo of radiation emission by brain cells
WATTENBERG AT LARGE: Medical
Doctors look at a computer model of brain activity with different colored areas for high and low concentration areas. This may be an early PET scan (Positron emission tomography).
WATTENBERG AT LARGE: Medical
Ben Wattenberg In your specific field of cancer research, is that also the case that this is a gradual, incremental, sort of scaling on of item after item of technology that sooner or later yields something? Perhaps you could describe something
WATTENBERG AT LARGE: Medical
Microscopic film of cellular activity, may be cancer cells.
WATTENBERG AT LARGE: Medical
Dr. Lewis Thomas, Chancellor Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, I think two things have been going on. One a gradual but steadily incremental improvement in the various technologies we have for treating cancer - surgery, radiation and today s version of chemotherapy which are far better than they were 10 years ago. But I think something else is happening. I think the odds are that with the power that now exists in technologies for basic science, particularly in today s instruments, it is now possible to ask rather direct questions that would have been unthinkable 10 years ago. We re really quite close to being able to understand the molecular genetics of the transformation of normal cells in to cancer cells. Ben Wattenberg You say quite close . That would be a monumental breakthrough if we understood that mechanism. Dr. Lewis Thomas We re not that necessarily close to a cure for cancer but we are, I think, within real time a few years near to the time when we will probably be able to understand the molecular mechanisms which underlie cancer. I think, we will probably, if things go well, and if the basic science effort is continued, we ll probably be devolving totally new forms of therapeutic approach to cancer based on whatever that new deeper information is. Today what we have is a technology that allows us to kill rapidly growing cells. But we are not able to selectively kill cancer cells because of their neoplastic nature. It s that more precise kind of therapy that I think lies somewhere ahead. The prediction was made in the early 1970s when arguments were stridently held about the wisdom of the conquest of cancer program. Several eminent scientists protested that the program shouldn t be launched at that time because we were 50 years away from being able to ask really significant questions about cancer. One of the eminences who made that kind of prediction told me that he s revised it, now its 2 years in his own laboratory. Things are moving very fast.
WATTENBERG AT LARGE: Medical
Ben Wattenberg I remember about a decade ago doing an interview with people in the cancer community and they were saying there s not much hope with something we don t understand it s not one disease, its 100 diseases we may never get there. That s not what you all seem to be telling us. Is that correct? Dr. Philip Handler, I think there s a much larger sense of an early future. The problem is attractable, rather than an intractable problem. And we re on the path to gaining an understanding as Dr. Thomas said. I would suggest that in much of the community there is a greater sense of conviction that we can hope to have relatively early understanding which will lead to early diagnosis and successful therapy and that we re more likely to be successful down that trail than simply preventing cancer. Dr. Lewis Thomas, Unless we trip over something very interesting in the immunological line and find ourselves with a vaccine of some kind. I think that unlikely. I don t think we can do too much about the environmental hazards by trying to eliminate them. We really would have to get off the earth and it s worse out there.