AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
A daily look at some of The News & Observer headlines on this date in past years.
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In 1999, The News & Observer published the story of UNC Chapel Hill Ph.D. candidate, Andrew Xiao, trying to engineer a mouse genetically susceptible to brain cancer.
“To make a mouse, it’s much harder than that,” Xiao said. “To make a mouse takes a year and a half. It’s really very difficult to make a mouse.”
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Despite several months of trying, Xiao had been unsuccessful in creating baby mice that carried the brain cancer gene he fabricated from a monkey virus. Scientific knowledge collected from mice born with the malignant tumor called glioblastoma could be transferred to more common, slow-growing forms of cancer.
“While it is unlikely that Xiao’s mouse would lead directly to a cure for human cancer, the young scientist could legitimately fantasize that it would have an impact,” The N&O wrote. “It might prompt some other scientist, somewhere, someday, to make an observation that would trigger an insight that would lead to a procedure that would provoke a discovery that would save the lives of Xiao’s own fellow human beings.”
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