New Name, New Story

Well, in line with the new focus for this blog, I've renamed it to "Technology and Aid in the Modern World." It still doesn't have quite the exact feeling to it that I want to convey, but its much closer.

And, to go along with it, I have another story for you guys, this time from Wired. In a special on cancer, they profiled Don Listwin who, looking back, must have worked at Cisco right about the same time I did. He was the heir apparent to Cisco CEO John Chambers when his mom was misdiagnosed (twice) with a bladder infection instead of the cancer that she was actually suffering from.

Well, Listwin, like many in his position, knew that something had to be done, but he did it in a very engineering sort of way. Listwin found out that 90% of patients whose cancer was discovered early (so-called Stage I) live to survive their cancer, while only 10% of late-discovered cancers (Stage IV) survided. Listwin's Mom was a stage IV cancer patient by the time she was diagonsed. Probability wise, if Listwin's Mom had been in the Stage I category, she will still be alive today. Now Listwin had worked at Cisco during the boom years and had manage to put together over $100 million dollars in savings, so he decided to stop his business pursuits and start the Canary Foundation - an institution devoted to enabling cancer detection in as many and as early of ways as possible. Well done Mr. Listwin.