3 boys searching for life!
The idea
September 2009 Peter Kapitein, Jan Gerrit Schuurman and Coen van Veenendaal visited the United States of America. At that moment the health bill, which is the first attempt for a fair healthcare system at a national scale, did not yet get through Congress. In this huge country that sometimes seems to have lost its sense of direction, they look for wisdom. They visit The Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, the Rockefeller University and The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
Never Ever Quit! is their motto. They want the impossible and they are looking for its beginning. They are that practical, after all. Where the impossible starts something new may be in reach.
They start with cancer. Too many people are dying of cancer each year. In total 8 million all over the world. The three boys carried with them two big questions :
- Is it possible to get cancer in control and can it be made a chronic disease? A disease that allows people good quality of life even when they are forced to live with the cancer?
- If so, how can we stimulate the scientific research so that this will happen and we will be able to tell to people: ´Yes you do have cancer but it is under control´.
Who did they meet?
The three boys spoke with five brilliant scientists in the USA and one in the UK.
Freeman Dyson. A British born American Physicist and Mathematician. Famous for his work in Quantum field theory, solid-state physics and nuclear engineering. Mr Dyson lives and works in Princeton, NJ.
Arnold Levine is professor at Princeton, NJ. Mr Levine is famous for the discovery of the protein P53 and was the former director of the laboratory of Rockefeller University.
Harold Varmus is an American Nobel Prize winning scientist. He won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncology. Professor Varmus is head of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Research Institute and advisor for Science and Technology of president Obama. Professor Varmus is also a biker!
Paul Nurse is a British Nobel Prize winning biochemist. He won the Nobel Prize for his discovery regarding cell cycle regulation by cyclin and cyclin dependent kynases.
James D. Watson. The Noble Prize winning American Molecular Biologist. Watson has won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the DNA structure, ‘The Double Helix’ in 1953. He was 25 years old at the time!
Nikolas Rose is the James Martin White professor of sociology at the London School of Economics and acting director of LSE’s BIOS Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society. He was originally trained as a biologist.
The questions
We ask the scientists three kinds of questions:
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