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Category: News

Outreach, with a Bang!

Last Friday a team of lecturers and instructors from Canterbury Christ Church School of Life Sciences headed to Discovery Park for the annual Big Bang Fair. The Big Bang Fair is organised by Kent & Medway STEM, with the aim of inspiring a love of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths subjects in students from local schools and academies. The format of the event ensures a hands-on experience for all students, with interactive workshops and exhibits held throughout the day.

Cancer and Height

By Simon Harvey, Director of Life Sciences

There’s recently been a lot of media coverage of work that has identified height as a risk factor for a number of cancers. Now it’s been many years since I’ve looked seriously at the scientific literature around cancer risk, but it’s been known that height is a risk factor for cancer, particularly breast cancer, for a long time. That this story was so widely covered therefore seems a bit surprising. What is the deal? Is this a new discovery, a confirmation of an old discovery or it is just that cancer, dementia and heart disease, the big three killers, are always newsworthy?

Cancer research and treatment; past, present and future

“Cancer is not a new disease”, said Professor Michelle Garrett, while speaking at a lecture organised by Kent Cancer Trust at Canterbury Christ Church University to an audience of over 100 people recently. She referred to the Edwin Smith Papyrus that was written around 1700 BC that includes descriptions of tumours that were removed by cauterisation with a tool called the”fire drill”! The word “cancer” is credited to the Greek physician Hippocrates (460 – 370 BC).