I'm currently reading The Journey of Man, a great book my uncle gave me for birthday. It follows the molecular history of the dispersal of humans across the world, starting in Africa and branching out.
We can trace single DNA polymorphisms that are prevalent in entire populations (Europeans vs. South Asians for example) back to a single mutation in a single man or woman. We trace changes in skills, language, and human progress along with this molecular paths.
While I was daydreaming on the shuttle yesterday, I was hit by the fact that it didn't just matter that these gene mutations were made, but the other fact, the fact that the human with this mutation was able to reach out beyond what he or she knew at the time. Imagine being the first person to draw something? Or the first human being to put complex sentences together? It is absolutely incredible to me, because it takes a leap in thinking and processing, but it also means you have to go against the grain, against what is normal. Against the rules.
I've been thinking a lot lately about scientific innovation. In breast cancer we have pretty good treatments, but we don't have a cure. There must be a way to prevent it, or at least to guarantee it won't come back. There just must be. But the rules, the way we think, what we know to be true, could be wrong, in which case we could be missing something. Something obvious even if we changed the rules/principles we know.
Hehe maybe I'll have the genetic mutation that will allow a leap of thinking to occur. If I could break a "rule" I'd want to rethink transportation. I wish there was a way for us to just morph ourselves where we want to be. Or maybe not. Maybe just a way for me to morph myself to any location in the world. It could be dangerous if everyone had that capability. This way I could take all the liquids I want and visit all my friends in cool places without spending a nickel.
1 comment:
What a coincidence that you've been reading this book! I'm giving a bootcamp lecture this fall on human genetic variation and disease, and since I know little to nothing about it I've taken this week to start doing some background reading.
I've come across some mention of complex diseases such as breast cancer. When you have something like cystic fibrosis, where the cause of the disease can be pinpointed to one particular gene (even if that gene could be mutated hundreds of different ways to produce variations in severity, age of onset, etc), traditional ideas of one drug, one target can be effective treatments. But when you've got a complex disease, where hundreds of genes are involved and each one contributes at most 1-2% to the disease phenotype, it doesn't make sense to use tried-and-true methods of drug design and discovery.
I'm ultimately pessimistic about our ability to cure advanced (or even moderate) cancers using traditional approaches. We need something completely different! The genome-wide scans I've been reading about might help identify people's genes that are at risk of becoming oncogenes, and if we could develop a kind of preventative gene therapy to insert "good" copies of those genes into people before they got sick...
I wonder what religious fundamentalists would think of all this. And if they'd change their minds once they got cancer.
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