Number of attendees: ~17,000

(Population of the town that I grew up in: ~20,000)

Pages in the program book: 590

Number of sessions I attended today in which a cell phone rang during a presentation: 5

Number of sessions I attended today in which a cell phone rang, and the owner answered it and started talking during a presentation: 2

Number of sessions I attended today in which someone in the audience pulled out his cell phone, dialed, and started talking during a presentation: 1

Number of photos or recordings attendees are allowed to take of a presentation without explicit permission: 0

Number of people discreetly recording videos of Jeremy Rich’s (Duke University) talk this afternoon, after he had explicitly asked the audience not to: at least 2

A few semi-random stats culled from my notes.

Approximate age of the ‘cancer stem cell’ hypothesis: 150 years

Amount of money spent in the United States for cancer treatment in 2004: $72 billion

Number of candidate cancer biomarkers reported in the literature: at least 1261

Number of biomarkers approved each year by the US FDA since 1998: less than 1 per year

Percent increase in the risk of one kind of breast cancer in postmenopausal women who drink 3 or more glasses of alcohol each day: 51%

(that’s estrogen- and progesterone-receptor positive breast cancer, for those of you keeping score)

Number of women in the alcohol-and-breast-cancer study: 184,418

Percent decrease in the risk of colorectal cancer in mouse pups whose mothers were fed a diet rich in folic acid during pregnancy and lactation: 300%

I have just seen some of the world’s greatest minds dancing to “Play that funky music, white boy”.

What’s that? You want pictures and videos? The thought definitely crossed my mind, but they looked so happy out there on the dance floor at the AACR reception — I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Plus, I’m not sure what the legal ramifications of that would be. Could we be sued for posting an unflattering video of cancer researchers getting funky? Best not to take any chances.

In any case, I had some trouble accessing the internet from the conference today, so I’ll try to catch up on a little blogging before calling it a night.

Greetings from San Diego — or, as I’ve come to think of it, ‘the surface of the sun’. Normally I’d spend this introductory, ‘scene-setting’ blog entry whining about how I’d rather be out playing in the Pacific. Not today. It was absurdly, oppressively, unjustly sunny outside. The sun streamed into the windows of the convention center, and attendees squinted and winced down the hallway. Some sat out on the patio, stretched out with their feet up on chairs sunbathing, but I don’t know how they did it. One trip out of the convention center for lunch left me sunburned and sapped. A darkened conference room offered sanctuary, but the doorway opened into one of those sun-drenched hallways. From inside the room, the hallway was nothing more than a blaze of white light.

Overall, today was a slow day, filled with educational sessions that were informative but not so newsy. Tomorrow the meeting kicks off in earnest at 7am…

So, remember how fat is one of the few factors consistently linked to cancer? Researchers are hard at work trying to figure out why, and here’s what they’re learning, according to a symposium on the obesity-cancer link:

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Well, hopefully not. But today, I learned that some researchers question the wisdom of adding a nutrient called folic acid to flour, as we do in the United States. Folic acid is a form of vitamin B that is essential for preventing very serious birth defects. It’s also suspected to prevent colon cancer. But confusingly, some researchers also seem to be concerned that too much folate given throughout life creates its own cancer risk, and that giving it to pregnant women (as is currently recommended) creates cancer hazards for the fetus.

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If you’re like me, you often find yourself confused by scientific advice on what to eat for good health. For every study that finds some miracle benefit to some food, another study always seems to come along and contradict the results of the first. This meeting is no exception. One study released yesterday claimed to have found a chemical reason why soy prevents cancer. But another study presented today claims the opposite, reporting that soy doesn’t prevent colon cancer. So should you blend up that delicious tofu shake, or not?

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How much is a month of life worth to you?

This is a question no one should have to ask herself, but cancer patients often must – for instance, in the United States, where 16 percent of patients are uninsured and drug costs are ballooning. Breast cancer treatment with Genentech’s drug Herceptin, for example, can cost $70,000.

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Cancer researchers are embarking on a huge experiment that is attempting to deliver on science’s promise to usher in the era of personalized medicine. Led by the National Cancer Institute, the project is called the Cancer Genome Atlas. The idea is to catalog all the genetic mutations associated with cancer. The positive spin on this project is that it’s highly ambitious, but some have called it foolhardy. Tonight, a room of brain cancer researchers hashed over their portion of the Cancer Genome Atlas – a pilot project to catalog genetic mutations in one form of brain cancer called glioblastoma multiforme. And, as scientists are wont to do, they spent more than an hour pointing out all the flaws with the design of the brain cancer part of the atlas.

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