“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
George Bernard Shaw – Dramatist (1856 – 1950)
The Nurse and Albert
“My name’s Albert. I’m 72. I work the counter at Sam’s Auto Repair on Chestnut Street. $11 an hour, writing up repair orders, calling customers when their cars are ready. I don’t fix the cars myself anymore. Bad knees. Just handle the paperwork.
But I see people’s faces when we tell them the cost.
Like the nurse who came in last Tuesday. Transmission problem. $1,800 to fix. She just stood there, staring at the estimate. “I can’t,“ she whispered. “I work night shifts. No car means no job. But I don’t have $1,800”
I looked at Sam, the owner. He shook his head. “Sorry ma’am. That’s the cost.”
She left crying.
That night, I stayed late. Called Sam at home. “What if we did the transmission for $600? I’ll cover the rest. Take it from my paycheck. Monthly installments.”
Long pause. “Albert, that’s your money.”
“So? She needs to work. I need to help.”
He sighed. “You’re gonna go broke doing this.”
“Maybe. But she’ll have a car.”
We called her back. Sam told her we “found a used transmission, much cheaper” She cried again. Different tears.
Started doing it regularly. Covering repair costs people couldn’t afford. Mechanics would give me the real price. I’d tell customers a lower one. Pay the difference over months from my paycheck.
Sam caught on. Pulled me aside. “Albert, you’ve paid for eight repairs this year. That’s $3,000”
“People need their cars to survive”
He studied me. Then, “I’ll match you. Whatever you cover, I’ll cover half. We do this together3”
Word got out somehow. Customers started leaving money. “For whoever can’t afford repairs” We started a jar. “Sam’s Second Chance Fund.” When someone’s desperate, we use it.
That nurse? She brings us coffee every week. And she put $50 in the jar last month. “For the next person,” she said.
I’m 72. I write repair orders at a small garage.
But I’ve learned this, cars aren’t just transportation. They’re how people get to work. Get kids to school. Get to the hospital. Survive.
And nobody should lose everything because their car broke down.
So find your repair. Your thing you can fix for someone. Then fix it. Quietly.
Because sometimes, keeping someone’s car running keeps their whole life running.”
Fixing A Toaster… …And A Person
I was locking the door on fifty years of my life when he slammed his hand against the glass, desperate, looking like a man who was about to lose the only thing keeping him tethered to the earth.
I didn’t want to open it. The “For Lease” sign was already taped up, mocking me with its bright orange optimism. Inside, my shop was dark. The air smelled of what it always had: ozone, solder, and dust that settled before the internet was born. I was done. At seventy-four, my back felt like a rusted hinge and my rent had just tripled because the neighborhood now needed another artisanal cold-brew coffee lab more than it needed a man who could rewire a lamp.
But the boy—he couldn’t have been more than twenty-eight—kept pounding. He wasn’t threatening; he was terrifyingly fragile. He held a cardboard box against his chest like it contained a bomb or a beating heart.
I sighed, the sound rattling in my chest, and turned the key one last time.
“We’re closed,” I said, cracking the door. “Permanently. Read the sign.”
“Please,” he gasped. He was wearing a suit that cost more than my van, but his eyes were red-rimmed shadows. “You’re the only one left. I Googled ’repair shops’ for three hours. You’re the only one who doesn’t just sell phone cases.”
He pushed past me before I could argue, placing the box on the counter. He opened it with trembling hands. Inside wasn’t a bomb. It was a toaster.
Not one of those plastic shells you buy for twenty bucks at a big-box store that die in six months. This was a 1950s chrome tank. Heavy as a cinderblock, with rounded curves and a cloth-wrapped cord.
“It won’t go down,” he said, his voice cracking. “The lever. It won’t stay down.”
I looked at the clock. I had to be out by five. “Son, go buy a new one. That thing is a fire hazard.”
“I can’t,” he whispered. “It was my grandmother’s. She died Tuesday. The funeral is tomorrow morning. I promised my mom… I promised I’d make Gram’s cinnamon toast for breakfast before we leave for the cemetery. It’s the only thing that feels real right now. And I broke it.”
He looked up at me, and I saw the crack in his veneer. He wasn’t just talking about a kitchen appliance.
“I tried to fix it,” he confessed, looking at his hands—soft, uncalloused, typing hands. “I watched a video. But I couldn’t even find a screw. It’s like a puzzle I’m too stupid to solve. Everything I own is like that. I pay for it, but I don’t understand it.”
That hit me. That was the sickness of this whole decade.
I locked the door and flipped the sign to Closed. “Bring it here.”
I cleared a space on the workbench, sweeping aside the remnants of my packing. I plugged in my soldering iron. It hummed to life, a familiar comfort.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Julian.”
“I’m Elias. Now, Julian, look at this.” I pointed to the bottom of the toaster. “You couldn’t find the screws because they didn’t want you to. But back when this was made, they assumed the owner had a brain. The tabs are hidden under the rubber feet.”
I popped the feet off and unscrewed the base. The chrome shell slid off, revealing the naked machinery inside. It was beautiful in its simplicity. Mica sheets, nichrome wire, a simple bimetallic strip. No microchips. No software updates. No terms of service.
“You’re an engineer?” I asked, noticing the ring on his finger—the iron ring of the profession.
Julian laughed, a bitter, dry sound. “Software. I work for a… a large platform. You know what I did last week? I spent sixty hours optimizing an algorithm that keeps teenagers staring at their screens three seconds longer. That’s my contribution to history. If I died today, my work would be deleted or rewritten in a month.”
He stared at the exposed wires of the toaster. “This thing… this thing has lasted seventy years. It fed my dad. It fed me. What have I built that will last seventy years?”
I handed him a pair of needle-nose pliers. “Stop talking. Hold this spring.”
He hesitated. “I might break it.”
“It’s already broken,” I grunted. “That’s the beauty of metal, Julian. It forgives you. You bend it back. You try again. It’s not like your code. You can touch it.”
I guided his hands. We found the problem—a buildup of carbon on the electromagnet contact and a bent latch arm.
“This is why I’m closing,” I said, scraping the carbon away with a small file. “Nobody wants to scrape the carbon anymore. It’s cheaper to throw it in a landfill and buy a new shiny box. They call it ’convenience.’ I call it surrendering.”
“It’s not just convenience,” Julian said softly. “It’s exhaustion, Elias. We’re tired. I make six figures, and I can’t afford a house in this zip code. I have a degree, and I’m terrified of an AI taking my desk. Everything feels like a subscription. I rent my music, I rent my storage, I rent my life. This toaster… it’s the only thing I actually have.”
I looked at him. Really looked at him. I saw the anxiety that seemed to vibrate in the air around young people these days. They were told they could be anything, but they ended up being users. Customers. Data points.
“Then earn it,” I said sternly. “Tighten that nut. Not too hard—snug. Feel the tension.”
He turned the screwdriver. He bit his lip. For twenty minutes, the world outside didn’t exist. There were no emails, no shareholders, no rent hikes. Just the mechanical logic of a latch engaging with a catch. Cause and effect. Tangible truth.
“Okay,” I said. “Plug it in.”
He hesitated, then pushed the plug into the wall. He pressed the lever down.
Click.
It stayed.
We waited. Ten seconds. Twenty. Then, the faint, dry scent of heating dust filled the shop—the perfume of resurrection. The coils inside glowed a deep, angry orange. It was alive.
Julian let out a breath that sounded like a sob. He stared into the glowing coils as if they were a campfire in a frozen wilderness.
“We did it,” he whispered.
“You did it,” I corrected. “I just showed you where to look.”
He pulled a wallet from his jacket. It was thick, expensive leather. “How much? I’ll write you a check. Five hundred? A thousand? Seriously, name it.”
I unplugged the iron and started winding the cord. “Put your money away.”
“No, I have to pay you. You saved me.”
“You can’t pay me, son. The business is closed. Remember?” I picked up the screwdriver we’d used—an old Craftsman with a clear acetate handle, battered and stained with grease from 1985. I pressed it into his hand.
“Take this.”
“What? No, I can’t—”
“Take it,” I commanded. “This is the payment. Listen to me. The world you’re living in? It wants you to be helpless. It wants you to throw things away so you have to buy them again. It wants you to feel like you can’t impact your own reality.”
I closed his fingers around the handle.
“When you go home, don’t just make toast. Look around your apartment. Find a loose hinge. Tighten it. Find a wobbly chair. Glue it. Reclaim your hands, Julian. If you can fix a toaster, you can fix other things. Maybe even things that aren’t made of metal.”
He looked at the tool, then at me. The panic was gone from his eyes, replaced by a quiet, steady weight. He nodded.
He packed the warm toaster back into the box with a reverence usually reserved for religious artifacts. He shook my hand—a firm grip, stronger than when he walked in.
“Thank you, Elias.”
“Go make that toast,” I said.
I watched him walk out. He didn’t check his phone. He walked differently, with the stride of a man who knew how the world worked under the hood.
I turned off the lights in the shop. I looked at the empty shelves, the dusty floor. I wasn’t sad anymore. They could tear this building down. They could put up another glass tower filled with people renting their lives one month at a time. But they couldn’t take away what just happened.
We are told that we are consumers. That we are helpless against the tide of the economy, of technology, of time. But that is a lie sold to us to keep us buying.
The truth is simpler, and it’s the only thing worth knowing:
Anything can be fixed, as long as there is a hand willing to hold the tool, and a heart patient enough to understand why it broke.
I locked the door, leaving the key in the mailbox. I didn’t need it anymore. I had done my job. The shop was closed, but the work—the real work—would continue in a kitchen somewhere, over the smell of cinnamon and heat, where a young man was learning that he wasn’t broken, just in need of a little repair.
Karen Blixen – Out of Africa
She lost her fortune, her husband, and the love of her life in Africa—then turned that devastation into one of the most beautiful books ever written.
Denmark, 1913. Karen Dinesen was 28 years old, aristocratic, brilliant, and desperately unhappy. She’d been in love with a man who wouldn’t marry her—Hans Blixen, a Swedish baron and notorious womanizer. When he rejected her, she did something dramatic: she agreed to marry his twin brother instead.
Bror Blixen was charming, adventurous, and completely unreliable. But he offered something Karen wanted more than love: escape.
In January 1914, newlyweds Karen and Bror sailed for British East Africa with a plan to run a dairy farm. When they arrived in what is now Kenya, Bror changed his mind. Coffee plantation, he decided. Karen had invested her entire inheritance—her family’s money—into this venture.
She had no choice but to agree.
They bought 4,500 acres at the foot of the Ngong Hills, six thousand feet above sea level, where the air was thin and clear and the view stretched to Mount Kenya. Karen called it Mbogani—”the house in the woods” in Swahili.
It should have been paradise.
Instead, it became a seventeen-year lesson in loss.
Within months of marriage, Karen discovered Bror had infected her with syphilis—a disease that would cause her chronic pain for the rest of her life. He was flagrantly unfaithful, openly taking mistresses, disappearing for weeks on safari while Karen ran the farm alone.
By 1921, they were separated. By 1925, divorced.
But Karen stayed. Because by then, she’d fallen in love—not with a man, but with Africa itself.
She learned Swahili. She walked the coffee fields at dawn, checking plants with her Kikuyu workers. She settled disputes, treated illnesses, taught children to read. The Kikuyu called her “Msabu”—a term of respect that acknowledged she was both foreign and somehow theirs.
Her coffee farm was doomed from the start. The altitude was too high—coffee wouldn’t thrive there. She fought droughts, disease, pests, falling prices. She poured money into a venture that would never be profitable. But she kept trying because the farm gave her something she’d never had: purpose, autonomy, a place that was entirely hers.
And then she met Denys Finch Hatton.
He was everything Bror wasn’t—educated at Eton and Oxford, a big-game hunter who quoted poetry, a man who loved the wild as much as she did but refused to be tamed by convention. He wouldn’t marry her. He wouldn’t live with her permanently. He came and went on his own schedule, flying his small plane across East Africa, returning to Mbogani when he chose.
It should have been maddening. Instead, it was the great love of her life.
They read poetry aloud on the veranda—Homer, Shelley, Coleridge. They flew over the Serengeti in his yellow Gypsy Moth, watching herds of wildebeest move like shadows across the plains. They talked about everything—philosophy, literature, the nature of freedom and belonging.
Denys gave Karen something no one else ever had: intellectual partnership without possession.
But freedom always has a price.
In May 1931, Denys took off in his plane for a routine flight. Hours later, word reached Mbogani: his plane had crashed shortly after takeoff. He was dead instantly, his body burned beyond recognition.
Karen buried him in the Ngong Hills, overlooking the land he’d loved. She placed a simple marker: “He prayeth well, who loveth well”—a line from Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
Three weeks later, the coffee market collapsed. Karen’s farm—already struggling, kept alive only by loans and determination—finally failed completely. The bank foreclosed. Seventeen years of work, gone.
She was 46 years old, bankrupt, chronically ill, and heartbroken. She’d lost everything in Africa—her fortune, her marriage, the man she loved, the land she’d given her life to.
She returned to Denmark with nothing.
Except the stories.
Back in her mother’s house, sleeping in her childhood bedroom, Karen began to write. She wrote in English—not her native Danish—as if writing in a foreign tongue would let her see it more clearly. She wrote not to explain Africa but to capture it—the light, the silence, the way sunset turned the Ngong Hills purple, the dignity of the Kikuyu people who’d worked beside her.
She wrote about Denys without naming the depth of her grief. She wrote about loss without self-pity. She wrote about colonialism without either defending or condemning it—simply describing what it meant to live between worlds, belonging fully to neither.
The manuscript was rejected by American publishers. Too literary, they said. Too fragmented. No clear plot.
Then in 1937, it was published in Denmark and Britain under the title “Out of Africa,” credited to Isak Dinesen—a pen name Karen had chosen years earlier.
The book became a sensation.
Critics called it poetry disguised as memoir. Readers recognized something rare: complete honesty about what it means to love a place you can never truly possess, to be changed by a land you’ll have to leave.
The famous opening line became one of the most recognized in literature: “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.”
Past tense. Already lost. The entire book is an elegy for something that ended.
Karen Blixen went on to write more books—gothic tales, philosophical stories, works that cemented her reputation as one of the 20th century’s great stylists.
She was nominated for the Nobel Prize multiple times. Ernest Hemingway said if he’d won the Nobel Prize in 1954, it should have gone to “that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen.”
But “Out of Africa” remained her masterpiece—the book that turned personal devastation into universal art.
In 1985, Sydney Pollack directed a film adaptation starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. It won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
Millions of people discovered Karen’s story, though the film romanticized what the book had left raw.
Karen Blixen died in 1962 at age 77, never having returned to Kenya. She’d spent the last three decades of her life in Denmark, but anyone who read her work knew: part of her never left Africa.
Because “Out of Africa” isn’t really about Africa at all. It’s about what we lose when we love things we can’t keep. It’s about the price of freedom and the ache of belonging. It’s about how the places that break us also make us who we are.
Karen Blixen went to Africa seeking escape and found herself instead—then lost everything and wrote it into permanence.
She arrived with money and naivete. She left with nothing but memories. And those memories became one of the most beautiful books in the English language.
“I had a farm in Africa.”
Five words. Past tense. Already mourning what came next.
Sometimes the stories that endure aren’t the ones about triumph—they’re the ones about what we loved and lost and somehow survived anyway.
Karen Blixen’s farm failed. Her marriage ended. Her lover died. Her health deteriorated. Africa—the place that had given her life meaning—became a place she could only visit in memory.
But she wrote it down. Every sunset, every conversation, every moment of joy and sorrow. She preserved it in prose so vivid that readers seventy years later can still feel the wind across the Ngong Hills.
She couldn’t keep Africa.
But she made sure we’d never forget it.
Prostate Cancer Has An Achilles Heel – And It Has Been Found!
Scientists have identified a single enzyme that acts as the “Achilles’ heel” of prostate cancer — and developed a way to shut it down without harming healthy tissue.
The enzyme, known as PI5P4Ka, fuels tumor cell growth and resistance to chemotherapy. By blocking it, researchers found that cancer cells rapidly self-destruct due to energy starvation, while normal cells remain untouched.
This targeted approach is a major leap beyond radiation or chemo, which damage healthy tissue and cause severe side effects. The treatment uses precision inhibitors, tiny molecules that lock onto the enzyme’s active site, effectively turning off the tumor’s power supply.
Rosina Bulwer-Lytton
She married into power and believed, for a time, that intelligence and loyalty would protect her.
It did not.
Rosina Bulwer-Lytton was not a quiet woman. She was sharp, articulate, politically aware, and deeply principled. In Victorian England, those qualities were tolerable in private and dangerous in public. They became unforgivable once she attached them to a powerful man.
Her husband, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, was one of the most influential figures of his age. A celebrated novelist. A member of Parliament. A man whose reputation was carefully cultivated and fiercely defended. To the public, he was brilliant and respectable. To Rosina, he was controlling, dismissive, and increasingly hostile to her independence.
Their marriage was troubled almost from the start. Rosina spoke her mind. She challenged his politics. She criticized his hypocrisy. And when their relationship collapsed, she refused to disappear quietly.
That refusal sealed her fate.
In Victorian Britain, a husband did not need evidence to destroy a wife. He needed only authority and the right language. Edward Bulwer-Lytton used both. He declared Rosina “hysterical,” invoked the prevailing medical myths about women’s instability, and had her forcibly committed to a private asylum.
There was no trial. No medical examination she could contest. No crime she had to commit.
Her offense was public defiance.
Inside the asylum, Rosina discovered the truth she would later risk everything to expose. She was not surrounded by madness. She was surrounded by women like herself. Women who spoke too freely. Women who embarrassed men of influence. Women who resisted marriages, questioned religion, demanded autonomy, or simply refused obedience.
They were restrained, isolated, drugged, silenced. Not because they were ill, but because they were inconvenient.
Rosina endured confinement and survived it. And when she was released, she committed what Victorian society considered the ultimate betrayal.
She spoke.
She wrote about the asylum in detail. She described sane women treated as lunatics. She documented how psychiatry was used not as healing, but as discipline. She named her husband and made his actions public, exposing how easily the label of insanity could be weaponized against wives who challenged male authority.
The backlash was swift. Her reputation was shredded. Her credibility questioned. She was portrayed as bitter, unstable, vindictive. That, too, was part of the system. A woman who told the truth about power had to be discredited, or her words might force change.
Rosina did not retreat.
She aligned herself with reformers, with early suffragists, with those fighting for women’s legal and bodily autonomy. She turned her personal punishment into political testimony. She made it clear that what happened to her was not an anomaly. It was policy disguised as medicine. Control masquerading as care.
She understood something essential. Silence was the real sentence. The asylum was only the method.
By refusing to stay quiet, Rosina Bulwer-Lytton transformed a private act of cruelty into a public warning. She showed how easily women’s anger, intellect, and dissent could be reframed as pathology. How quickly a husband’s discomfort could become a diagnosis. How dangerous it was to live in a society where obedience was defined as sanity.
Her story does not belong to the past.
It echoes wherever women are told they are “too emotional” instead of being listened to. Wherever power responds to criticism by questioning mental fitness. Wherever dissent is medicalized rather than addressed.
Rosina Bulwer-Lytton paid dearly for telling the truth.
But because she told it, the machinery behind her confinement was exposed. And once exposed, it could never again pretend to be benign.
Thomas Garrett
The judge bankrupted him for helping enslaved people escape. He stood up in court and told everyone: send me more.
Wilmington, Delaware, 1848. Thomas Garrett stood before a federal court, facing financial ruin. Two Maryland slaveholders had sued him for helping an enslaved family escape to freedom. The evidence was clear—he’d hidden them, fed them, and sent them north on the Underground Railroad.
The verdict: guilty. The fine: $5,400—roughly $200,000 in today’s money.
It destroyed him financially. Everything he’d built as a successful iron merchant—gone. His business—crippled. At 59 years old, Thomas Garrett was bankrupt.
The judge, believing he’d broken this stubborn Quaker, said with satisfaction: “Thomas, I hope you will never be caught at this business again.”
Thomas Garrett stood up. And instead of showing contrition or defeat, he looked at the judge and said:
“Judge, thou hast left me not a dollar, but I wish to say to thee and to all in this courtroom that if anyone knows a fugitive who wants a shelter and a friend, send him to Thomas Garrett and he will befriend him.”
The courtroom went silent. The judge had just bankrupted him, and Thomas was publicly declaring—in a federal courthouse, in front of the very people who’d prosecuted him—that he would continue breaking the law.
Not quietly. Not secretly. Openly. Defiantly.
And he did.
For the next 23 years, until his death in 1871, Thomas Garrett continued operating one of the most important stations on the Underground Railroad. His home in Wilmington sat right on the dividing line between slave state (Maryland) and free state (Pennsylvania). It was the last stop before freedom for thousands of people fleeing enslavement.
Thomas Garrett wasn’t just helping people in secret. He was brazen about it. He kept detailed records of everyone he helped—something most Underground Railroad conductors never did because it was evidence of their “crimes.” He documented names, families, where they came from, where they went.
He helped approximately 2,500 people escape to freedom.
His most famous partnership was with Harriet Tubman. She would lead people north from Maryland, and Wilmington was often their first safe stop. Thomas would be waiting—with food, clothing, money, and a safe place to rest before the final push to Philadelphia and beyond.
Harriet Tubman trusted him completely. In a network where secrecy meant survival and one betrayal could mean death or re-enslavement, that trust meant everything.
“I never met with any loss,” Tubman said, reflecting on her 19 trips south. And that was partly because people like Thomas Garrett were absolutely reliable.
But here’s what’s remarkable about Thomas Garrett’s story: he didn’t start as a radical abolitionist. He started with one moment of witnessing injustice.
In 1813, when Thomas was 24, a free Black woman who worked for his family was kidnapped by slave catchers who planned to sell her south. Thomas tracked them down, confronted them, and secured her release.
That moment changed him. He saw firsthand how the system of slavery didn’t just oppress enslaved people—it endangered even free Black people. How the entire apparatus of law and commerce was designed to turn human beings into property.
From that day forward, he devoted his life to fighting slavery.
He rebuilt his business after the 1848 bankruptcy—with help from abolitionist supporters who were outraged at his treatment. He used his rebuilt fortune to fund Underground Railroad operations. His iron shop became a cover for resistance work.
When the Civil War came, Thomas was already in his 70s. He’d been fighting slavery for nearly 50 years by then. And when the war ended, when the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in 1865, Thomas didn’t stop working.
He continued advocating for Black civil rights through Reconstruction. He supported Black education. He worked for the passage of the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed Black men the right to vote.
Only after the 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870, when Thomas was 81 years old, did he finally retire.
He died in 1871. Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass both attended his funeral. These titans of the abolition movement came to honor the white Quaker merchant who’d spent his entire adult life—nearly 60 years—fighting alongside them.
Frederick Douglass said of him: “I can say what few men can say in this world, that I never felt myself in the presence of a stronger religious influence than while in this man’s house.”
Thomas Garrett’s story matters because it shows what resistance looks like when you refuse to stop.
He could have apologized after the 1848 trial. He could have paid the fine and quit. He could have said, “I tried, but the system is too powerful.”
Instead, he stood in that courtroom and announced he’d continue.
And he did. For 23 more years. Through bankruptcy, through the increasing dangers of the 1850s (when the Fugitive Slave Act made helping escapees even more dangerous), through the Civil War, through Reconstruction.
He never stopped.
That’s not just courage. That’s a lifetime commitment to justice even when justice seems impossible.
Today, Thomas Garrett’s house in Wilmington still stands. There’s a historical marker. Students learn about him in Delaware schools. But nationally, he’s largely forgotten—one of thousands of Underground Railroad operators whose names faded from history.
But Harriet Tubman didn’t forget. Frederick Douglass didn’t forget. And the 2,500 people who passed through his station—and their descendants—didn’t forget.
The judge in 1848 thought he could break Thomas Garrett with a fine. Instead, he created a moment that would define a life of resistance.
“If anyone knows a fugitive who wants a shelter and a friend, send him to Thomas Garrett.”
He meant it. For 23 years after that trial, he proved he meant it.
How many of us, facing total financial ruin for our principles, would stand up and publicly declare we’d do it again?
Thomas Garrett did. And then he actually did it again. And again. And again.
For 2,500 people, that defiance meant freedom.
SARS-CoV-2 Infection, the Spike Protein and GzmA: Yet Another Carcinogenic Mechanism
There is a serine protease that is actively secreted by cytotoxic immune cells like Natural Killer (NK) cells and T cells called GzmA. Levels of this protein are implicated in the development of cancer…
…If we look at SARS-CoV-2 infection, we discover that this protease is markedly elevated compared to healthy controls…
…So, what we have seen is yet another mechanism which shows that SARS-CoV-2 is almost certainly an oncogenic virus. One observation I have made over the years is how the virus and its Spike Protein can tip the balance of so many different biological processes. It seems to always find a way to push the “bad” lever when it affects a process that can be either beneficial or pathological in the body.
For the full story: https://open.substack.com/pub/wmcresearch/p/sars-cov-2-infection-the-spike-protein
The Brains Ha A Lymphatic Network
The discovery of a true lymphatic network surrounding the brain has been called one of the most significant breakthroughs in modern neuroscience, challenging the long-held belief that the brain was an “immune privileged” organ completely isolated from the body’s immune and waste-clearing systems. In 2015, researchers independently identified a network of meningeal lymphatic vessels nestled within the dura mater, the outermost membrane covering the brain.
This “missing link” fundamentally changed the understanding of neuro-immune interactions. The lymphatic system, traditionally known for collecting excess fluid, filtering waste, and transporting immune cells throughout the body, was proven to have a direct channel out of the central nervous system. These meningeal vessels work in conjunction with the glymphatic system, a network that flushes cerebrospinal fluid through the brain tissue to clear neurotoxins, including proteins associated with neurodegenerative disorders.
The discovery has vast implications for the study and treatment of major neurological diseases. Researchers are now intensely investigating how damage or reduced function in this drainage system may contribute to the development and progression of diseases like Alzheimer’s disease, Multiple Sclerosis, and Parkinson’s disease. Understanding how to reinforce this natural cleaning system opens entirely new avenues for therapeutic interventions.
NEW STUDY: Resveratrol and Copper Trigger System-Level Collapse of Human Glioblastoma Aggressiveness in Just 12 Days
In one of the deadliest human cancers, cheap nutraceuticals produced coordinated suppression of tumor proliferation, cancer hallmarks, immune checkpoints, stemness, and activated intrinsic apoptosis.
Glioblastoma (GBM) remains one of the most aggressive and lethal human cancers, with a median survival of roughly 15 months despite surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. In a newly published paper in BJC Reports titled, Attenuation of malignant phenotype of glioblastoma following a short course of the pro-oxidant combination of Resveratrol and Copper, researchers found a short, non-toxic oral intervention that simultaneously suppresses tumor proliferation, cancer hallmarks, immune checkpoints, and stemness — while activating intrinsic tumor cell death.
In a small but carefully controlled pre-surgical “window” study, human glioblastoma patients received resveratrol (5.6 mg) plus copper (560 ng) four times daily for an average of just ~12 days before tumor resection. Tumor tissue was then compared with untreated controls.
The results reveal a system-level attenuation of malignant phenotype: near-eradication of tumor-promoting cell-free chromatin particles (cfChPs)—accompanied by a ~31% reduction in tumor proliferation (Ki-67), suppression of nine cancer hallmarks and cancer stemness, simultaneous down-regulation of six immune checkpoints, and activation of intrinsic apoptosis, all within ~12 days.
This was not a marginal signal. It was a coordinated, system‑level biological shift in one of the deadliest cancers known…
CONCLUSION
After ~12 days of a non-toxic oral intervention (resveratrol plus copper), glioblastoma tumors demonstrated:
- Near-elimination of tumor-promoting chromatin debris (cfChPs)
- A marked reduction in tumor cell proliferation (Ki-67)
- Suppression of nine core hallmarks of cancer
- Simultaneous down-regulation of six immune checkpoints
- Significant loss of cancer stem cell markers
- Large-scale reprogramming of tumor gene expression
- Activation of organized, intrinsic tumor cell death with efficient cleanup
Together, these findings indicate that a short, non-toxic intervention can biologically “de-escalate” one of the most aggressive human cancers across multiple independent axes of malignancy.
The authors explicitly note that longer trials are urgently needed to determine whether prolonged treatment could push tumors toward a more benign phenotype or improve clinical outcomes.
https://open.substack.com/pub/petermcculloughmd/p/new-study-resveratrol-and-copper