A Child Born After January 1, 2014 Should Not Die of Breast Cancer

Barron’s Medical Journal Reporting from Janelia Farm, the Virginia research campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Asburn County, Virginia USA

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A Child Born After January 1, 2014 Should Not Die of Breast Cancer:

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Get Ready 2014 Is The Year Of The Greatest Science Discoveries This World Has Ever Known.

Twenty fourteen is the year that we can say A child born after January 1, 2014 should not die of breast cancer. The reason we can make such a bold prediction is there is several things happening in the science communities that gives the entire science and medical communities the scientific facts to back up such a bold statement. President Obama has given the green light and $100 million for scientist to study the human brain; European Union’s has set aside $1 billion for the Human Brain Project, Genetically modify babies is now going to be a common practice and one of the United States greatest scientist is leaving Harvard University for the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle Clay Reid.

$100 million in 2014, to invent and refine new technologies to understand the human brain, senior administration officials said Monday.

A senior administration scientist compared the new initiative to the Human Genome Project, in that it is directedBrought To You By Houston Ballet ALADDIN (AMERICAN PREMIERE)at a problem that has seemed insoluble up to now: the recording and mapping of brain circuits in action in an effort to “show how millions of brain cells interact.” It is different, however, in that it has, as yet, no clearly defined goals or endpoint. Coming up with those goals will be up to the scientists involved and may take more than year.

The effort will require the development of new tools not yet available to neuroscientists and, eventually, perhaps lead to progress in treating diseases like Alzheimer’s and epilepsyand traumatic brain injury. It will involve both government agencies and private institutions.

The initiative, which scientists involved in promoting the idea have been calling the Brain Activity Map project, will officially be known as Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, or Brain for short; it has been designated a grand challenge of the 21st century by the Obama administration. European Union’s $1 billion, decade-long Human Brain Project, there are numerous private and public research efforts in the United States and abroad, some focusing on the human brain.

A map of brain connections would be helpful for interpreting measurements of the signals transmitted between neurons. In the human brain, these signals travel in a complex network of 100 billion or so neurons, each of which is connected to 10,000 others.

The function of neural circuits is an emergent property arising from the coordinated activity of large numbers of neurons. To capture this, we propose launching a large-scale, international public effort, the Brain Activity Map Project, aimed at reconstructing the full record of neural activity across complete neural circuits. Conrad said that\ in 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick proposed the double helix structure for DNA. The double helix consists of a long chain of repeated units called nucleotides, of which there are four types: A, C, G, and T. Hereditary information is written in DNA using this alphabet of four letters. In the human genome, the sequence of nucleotides is about one billion letters long. The reading of this sequence was finally completed by the Human Genome Project in 2003.

Roughly 1,000 to 4,000 children born in the United States each year will develop a mitochondrial disease, most by age 10, with symptoms that can range from mild to devastating. These diseases typically prevent mitochondria from converting food into energy and are the result of genetic abnormalities, although some cases can be caused by exposures to toxins. Disorders caused by mutations in the mitochondrial DNA are passed down from the mother.

Developers of these modification techniques say they are a way for women with mitochondrial disease to give birth to healthy children to whom they are related genetically. Some are also promoting their use for age-related infertility. These are worthy goals. But these procedures are deeply problematic in terms of their medical risks and societal implications. Will the child be born healthy, or will the cellular disruptions created by this eggs-as-Lego-pieces approach lead to problems later on? What about subsequent generations? And how far will we go in our efforts to engineer humans?

These sorts of concerns were first voiced decades ago, well before the human genome had even been “mapped.” Those were the days when our accelerating knowledge about genetics led to over-optimistic hopes for quick fixes to an array of afflictions and grandiose visions of designing genetically enhanced babies to be more intelligent, athletic, musically talented and the like. More recently, many scholars, scientists and policy makers have urged a different approach: We should carefully and thoughtfully apply the tools of human genetic engineering to treat medical conditions in people, but we should not use them to manipulate the genetic traits of future children. Genetic modifications of sperm, eggs and early embryos should be strictly off limits. Otherwise, we risk venturing into human experimentation and high-tech eugenics.

Unfortunately, there are now worrisome signs that opposition to inheritable genetic modifications, written into law by dozens of countries, according to our count, may be weakening. British regulators are also considering mitochondrial manipulations, and proponents there, like their counterparts in the United States, want to move quickly to clinical trials. There are many ways to map the brain and many kinds of brains to map. Although the ultimate goal of most neuroscience is understanding how human brains work, many kinds of research can’t be done on human beings, and the brains of mice and even flies share common processes with human brains.

The work of Dr. Reid, and scientists at Allen and elsewhere who share his approach, is part of a surge of activity in brain research as scientists try to build the tools and knowledge to explain — as well as can ever be explained — how brains and minds work. All these efforts start with maps and enrich them. If Dr. Reid is successful, he and his colleagues will add what you might call the code of a brain process, the language the neurons use to store, transmit and process information for this function.

Not that this would be any kind of final answer. In neuroscience, perhaps more than in most other disciplines, every discovery lead to new questions.

Barron’s Medical Journal has put it altogether; If you were born the Kennedy administration you are living in a era where you can add a extra twenty years to your life. No other group can make that claim.