Oops in the Lab May Lead to Cure

Thank goodness there are people out there who are interested in scientific experiments. Not me. I don't have the patience for it and those little germs and cells and such don't say much. But, in this case, the dead cells were a dead giveaway that the researchers were on to something.

Turns out Katherine Schaefer thought she was having a bad day. Those darn cells she was working with just kept dying. She had chosen to work with cancer cells of a certain type because cancer cells can put up with just about anything, but they couldn't take the treatment that Schaefer was giving them. So she was frustrated and was about to toss the whole experiment away. She had made a calculation error and had used too much PPAR-gamma compound. Then she and a colleague realized she was killing cancer, for heaven's sake! So she dug the experiment out of the garbage, repeated it under numerous variations and multiple trials, and even within mice, the cancer couldn't survive this compound.

They are working to make this available for human trials soon. Sometimes our greatest achievements are our greatest mistakes.