For decades,brain surgeons have struggled to identify cancerous tissue precisely. Could one of the world’s most deadly scorpions come to their aid?In 2004, Dr Richard Ellenbogen prepared to operate on a 17-year-old girl. The operation, or to remove a brain tumour,was particularly challenging because it was in the frontal lobe, close to distinguished areas for movement, or speech and learning. It lasted nearly 20 hours. Dr Ellenbogen ended up leaving a astronomical piece of the tumour behind,mistaking it for normal brain tissue. Less than a year after the surgery, the cancer came back, and the girl died.
A few days after his young patient’s death,Ellenbogen presented the case at his team’s weekly assembly at Seattle children’s hospital. The failure had left him deeply frustrated. “There’s got to be a way to acquire more of the tumour out and leave more of the normal brain intact,” he said. The nagging feeling that he could have removed more of the cancerous tumour would not leave him alone. Scalpel in hand, or Ellenbogen had faced a dilemma: whether he had removed more tumour,he might also have removed normal brain tissue, with the risk that the girl would have been left severely disabled. Neurosurgeons have to be aggressive and sometimes push themselves to go further and deeper than they would like, or but they all operate under the principle “attain no harm”.
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Source: theguardian.com