Amphigouri: varnished nonsense

Even though I’ve a few years to go yet before I reach 40, often considered the standard age at which one’s First Mammogram is recommended, my family medical history is such that I went for my first baseline mammogram this morning. It was pretty much everything I had expected, what with all the boob-squooshing discomfort.

Now, I do understand the need for the breast compressions during xray. Really. And RadiologyInfo lays it out pretty clearly:

Breast compression is necessary in order to:

* Even out the breast thickness so that all of the tissue can be visualized.
* Spread out the tissue so that small abnormalities won’t be obscured by overlying breast tissue.
* Allow the use of a lower x-ray dose since a thinner amount of breast tissue is being imaged.
* Hold the breast still in order to eliminate blurring of the image caused by motion.
* Reduce x-ray scatter to increase sharpness of picture.

Nevertheless, while the technician was trying to make my amply-sized “chestal-region” into something more closely resembling a pancake, my inner cynic couldn’t help but wonder: “if men had breasts and had to submit to this procedure regularly, would there be some significant advancements in the whole process?”

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As an aside, I do know that Breast MRIs have been suggested (to complement mammograms) for women in a higher risk bracket (with some significant requirements for what qualifies as ‘higher risk’), but according to the American Cancer Society’s guidelines, primarily because of a reported increase in false-positive readings over mammograms the breast MRI isn’t recommended across the board.

Margaret Atwood wrote about pigoons in her book, Oryx and Crake - pigs modified with human stem cells in order to grow organs to be used for transplants. Looks like now scientists have actually created sheep that are “15% human” by “injecting adult human cells into a sheep’s foetus.” According to an article in The Mail On Sunday, Professor Esmail Zanjani (University of Nevada) has spent the last seven years working on the process:

He has already created a sheep liver which has a large proportion of human cells and eventually hopes to precisely match a sheep to a transplant patient, using their own stem cells to create their own flock of sheep.

The process would involve extracting stem cells from the donor’s bone marrow and injecting them into the peritoneum of a sheep’s foetus. When the lamb is born, two months later, it would have a liver, heart, lungs and brain that are partly human and available for transplant.

Let’s hope these “sheeple” don’t evolve the way of Atwood’s pigoons…

(via /. )