A group of scientists that won the Nobel prize last year, have seem to found a great advancement of how the body ages. They have found that there are little things, like the plastic tip of a shoe string, called telomeres on the ends of our chromosomes, which contain our DNA. These caps (telomeres), when duplicated tend to fray and shrink. When this happens the DNA tends to change slightly, which could possibly be the cause of some age related illnesses such as heart disease and some cancers. Although, they don’t yet know if the telomeres have anything to do with a person’s appearance.
The teams are still doing many different tests to help pinpoint a link to the length of telomere. They have found the gene that has to do with different lengths of telomere in different people. Right now they have found 500,000 genetic markers to using the whole genome and hopfully finding around 50 million markers.
Once they find out the missing pieces, they will be able to make new treatments to many age related diseases. But the treatments that we have now found might be more hurtful then helpful. They have found that if the fix the genes for heart disease then it could possibly cause the genes to carry cancer cells longer. Everyone has a certain amount of cancer cells but with the telomeres fraying they lose the trait after a few duplications, and fixing the cells could possibly stay longer causing the cancer cells to potentially become harmful.
Wow this is great news. Next thing we know they will be making a cure for aging. We might live forever. But is this a great idea? Should we really be messing with peoples genes so much? Oh well, I still feel that this is a great advancement in the field and we are now just one more step to a cure to all major disease. This is great for the future of man and our fight to survive.
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