The only woman on the US Supreme Court bench, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, has been operated upon for an early-stage pancreatic tumor at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York City. This is the second time the 75-year-old Ginsburg has been diagnosed of cancer - in 1999, she was treated for colorectal cancer.

Cancer experts are optimistic that Ginsburg has better chance of surviving than most others with a similar ailment, even though the pancreatic tumor is among the deadliest. The tumor was merely around one centimeter long, and has been removed.

According to a Supreme Court statement, Ginsburg's surgeon, Dr. Murray Brennan, has said that the justice would be have to stay under observation in the hospital for at least a week or ten days. However, the court refrained from divulging further details about Ginsburg's operation.

All that Kathy Arberg said in the statement was: "Justice Ginsburg had no symptoms prior to the incidental discovery of the lesion during a routine annual check-up in late January. A computerized axial tomography - CAT - scan revealed a small tumor, approximately one centimeter across, in the center of the pancreas."

An optimistic Dr. Joan Bull, Professor of Oncology at the University of Texas Medical School, said that if the tumor has been removed completely, "it does sound like a good outcome," because patients treated at stage 1 of pancreatic cancer have high chances of survival!