Writer Jeph Lobe has been working through the stages of grief in the most recent issues of Marvel Comics. You see, Captain America has been gunned down. And his buddies -- Wolverine, the Avengers, Iron Man, and Spider-Man -- are battling with denial, anger, bargaining, and depression. The whole story will be revealed when the latest issue, Fallen Son, hits newsstands July 5th, the day after Independence Day.

Loeb, also an executive producer for NBC's Heroes, chose his storyline to represent current politics.

"Part of it grew out of the fact that we are a country that's at war, we are being perceived differently in the world," he says. "He wears the flag and he is assassinated -- it's impossible not to have it at least be a metaphor for the complications of present day."

Researchers have found that when cells become cancerous, they become 100 times more likely to genetically mutate than non-cancerous cells. This explains why tumor cells have so many mutations. Good news on the research front. But bad news on the treatment front -- because therapies that target a certain gene may be largely ineffective in controlling cancer.

"This is very bad news, because it means that cancer cells in a tumor will have mutations that protect them from therapeutics," says lead researcher Dr. Lawrence Loeb, professor of pathology and biochemistry at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, who presented his findings February 18 at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco.

Loeb says chemotherapy drugs target specific oncogenes -- genes that affect the malignancy of a cell -- but if cancer cells are mutator cells, then a single tumor may have cells with all sorts of oncogenes. And while chemotherapy may kill some cancerous cells, millions of others will live on.

It's not all bad news, though, says Loeb who believes this research may help doctors determine the stage and malignancy of tumors by testing the number of mutations. It may also help researchers understand what makes a cancer cell a mutator and how to slow the rate of mutation.

"The idea is that if you might normally get exposed to something in the environment at 20 years old that would give you cancer by age 55, then if we cut the mutation rate in half, you might not get cancer until age 90, and you may even die of something else before that," Loeb explained.