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Ah, old and grouchy. Says nasty things sometimes.
Whatever happens, all I have to say is this: A cause of some muscular dystrophy is a premature stop codon.
That is the line that just took my breath away the first time I read it. I actually cried because it was so simple. So much suffering for such a simple DNA error.
And Mr. Lewis started, when no one had any idea what this terrible disease was, and for 50 years has seen it through. The kids often live to their 20s now. Not great, but better, and going to get much better soon.
Now the researchers can tell him that the reason muscular dystrophy appears in adolescence is that typically we have three versions of a gene for a particular enzyme: one active in the fetus, one active when we are juveniles, and one that becomes active when we go through puberty and become adults, and there is something wrong in the adult gene. In some cases, there is an error that terminates the construction of the enzyme so that a useless initial fragment is all that is produced.
Carl Sagan said that the greatest intellectual adventure anyone could ever have is to have enough information to formulate a question, and then for science to progress enough to understand the answer in a single lifetime.
This is why I am a technooptimist. We have reached the sweet part of the curve.
No one lives forever... yet. It would be nice if Jerry could live to see a cure for this and other genetic diseases. But he has lived long enough to have glimpsed the answers, and he knows they are coming. And that is something that has never happened before on this planet. There truly is something new under the Sun.
So whether he actually appears on Labor Day, a whole bunch of us will be watching in Tokyo, and he will be there. And we will sing You Will Never Walk Alone if he doesnt. And there will be a little less suffering in the world. And for that, a toast and a donation! Bravo!
http://insidetv.ew.com/2011/08/03/je...-mda-telethon/
Whatever happens, all I have to say is this: A cause of some muscular dystrophy is a premature stop codon.
That is the line that just took my breath away the first time I read it. I actually cried because it was so simple. So much suffering for such a simple DNA error.
And Mr. Lewis started, when no one had any idea what this terrible disease was, and for 50 years has seen it through. The kids often live to their 20s now. Not great, but better, and going to get much better soon.
Now the researchers can tell him that the reason muscular dystrophy appears in adolescence is that typically we have three versions of a gene for a particular enzyme: one active in the fetus, one active when we are juveniles, and one that becomes active when we go through puberty and become adults, and there is something wrong in the adult gene. In some cases, there is an error that terminates the construction of the enzyme so that a useless initial fragment is all that is produced.
Carl Sagan said that the greatest intellectual adventure anyone could ever have is to have enough information to formulate a question, and then for science to progress enough to understand the answer in a single lifetime.
This is why I am a technooptimist. We have reached the sweet part of the curve.
No one lives forever... yet. It would be nice if Jerry could live to see a cure for this and other genetic diseases. But he has lived long enough to have glimpsed the answers, and he knows they are coming. And that is something that has never happened before on this planet. There truly is something new under the Sun.
So whether he actually appears on Labor Day, a whole bunch of us will be watching in Tokyo, and he will be there. And we will sing You Will Never Walk Alone if he doesnt. And there will be a little less suffering in the world. And for that, a toast and a donation! Bravo!
http://insidetv.ew.com/2011/08/03/je...-mda-telethon/