Cancer Research

ABC, CBS and NBC will air a simultaneous one-hour fundraiser for cancer research in prime-time on Sept. 5. The "Stand Up to Cancer" broadcast will feature musical performances and celebrity appeals, although no guests were immediately announced Tuesday. The American Assn. for Cancer Research will distribute the money raised to specific organizations. The three network evening news anchors -- Katie Couric, Charles Gibson and Brian Williams -- were to announce the plans on the network morning news shows today, but word slipped out earlier.

After murdering her children in Euripides' classic "Medea," Annette Bening, with husband Warren Beatty, helped celebrate the launch of UCLA Live's Eighth International Theatre Festival at the play's opening-night party. No matter that the play is nearly 2,500 years old, Claudia Weill said, "the same issues are with us," including "disposability of women." Alan Schwartz, president of the Royce Center Circle, which supports UCLA's performing arts, said that although the university has presented plays for eight years, "Medea" was the first original production to be created by the UCLA Live series.

Dr. Judah Folkman, the Harvard surgeon who parlayed a chance observation into a bold and controversial new way to fight cancer and a host of other diseases, has died. He was 74. Folkman was changing planes at the Denver airport on his way to a conference in Vancouver, Canada, when he died Monday of a heart attack, his family said.

Dr. George E. Moore, the cancer researcher who was among the first to link chewing tobacco to mouth cancer and who built the Roswell Park Memorial Institute in Buffalo, N.Y., into a major cancer research center, died May 19 in Conifer, Colo. He was 88. The cause of death was bladder cancer, according to his family.

They can sit, and stay, and fetch. They can sniff out drugs, guide the blind, dial 911. Maybe they can even cure cancer -- or help cure it, anyway. Many scientists see cancer in dogs as an excellent model for cancer in humans, and evidence is growing that they're barking up a very useful tree. Late last month, a vaccine to treat canine melanoma won conditional approval from the U.S.

High levels of vitamin D can reduce the incidence of cancer by 60%, according to a small study of older women in Nebraska published Thursday. But the number of cancers observed in the four-year study, reported online in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, was small -- totaling only 50 -- leading some experts to question its conclusions. The study, which tracked 1,179 subjects, also looked only at older white women, so it is not clear whether the findings apply to other population groups.

By the time Brenda Oathout had finished chemotherapy for her breast cancer, the Caledonia, N.Y., woman noticed a distinct change in her ability to think. "Everything was a struggle. I couldn't remember things," she said. "Forgetfulness is not a strong enough word. My thought process was clouded. The more you struggle to think and remember, the more fatigued you become. By 3 o'clock, I was exhausted, overwhelmed with life."

UC San Francisco's Cancer Center has received a $150-million donation from a mysterious benefactor who doesn't want public recognition for the generous act. The donation, which comes in the form of direct grants and an endowment, is by far the largest cash gift ever given to UC San Francisco by a private individual or organization. The money will pay for an expansion of clinical research in which cancer patients are offered experimental treatments.

Marguerite Vogt, 94, a pioneer in the fields of polio and cancer research, died July 6 in La Jolla. Vogt, who until recently worked at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, died of natural causes, said Walter Eckhart, who directs the institute's cancer center. Vogt was credited, along with Salk colleague Renato Dulbecco, with completing groundbreaking studies of how the polio virus forms plaques in cell cultures. Their work helped develop polio treatments.

Cancer annually kills about 560,000 Americans, and it remains the No. 1 killer of people under 85. Yet the leading 2008 presidential candidates, as in previous electoral cycles, have been relatively silent on how they would lead a fight against the disease. None of them has made research funding and treatment of the disease a signature issue despite the fact that cancer has affected nearly half of the candidates' lives. On the Democratic side, the breast cancer of former Sen.