I've thought of a few ways to start this post and I've settled on this...for now.

Every once in a while you speak to someone who is doing something amazing. Tonight, it was Peter, or Pedro to his friends. He is one of the Irish guys here that I hang out with and he is here to do his post-doc research. He field of study is cancer and on a very drunken walk home he explained what he is doing. To do so, he explained genetics and cells and how cancer works and how we've been treating it and how we want to treat it. He is working on the "how we want to treat it" part. Basically right now, with chemo and other therapies, we are trying to kill as many cells as possible and if you treat it soon enough, you kill enough cancer cells and few enough of the good cells so that the good cells can kill the cancer cells. What happens is the good cells feel overwhelmed by the cancer cells and then they commit suicide, literally. He is trying to figure out how to "rally the troops", figuratively, so that they don't kill themselves and kill the cancer cells instead. Fucking wicked awesome.

What I learned was great and I felt miserable that I could pay the favor back. I could tell him about DB design and how to write a clever php script, but it certainly pales in consideration. I really need to find a new line of work!

Also, it's 5:13 AM, so I can't be sure what I wrote makes sense, though I believe in it thouroughly.