Beautiful Linda
Why I write all these things
Boy, this is heavy!
Scientists are examining a mutant protein that is deathly dangerous as a
possible cure for cancer! Yikes!
Okay, so in case you didn’t know (a very likely
condition): There is a condition called
Huntington’s disease, or Huntington’s chorea, that is very rare, inherited,
invariably fatal and, from some stuff in Wikipedia, a slow and damned
unpleasant way to die. It is caused by a
mutation in a gene called Huntingtin, which is transcribed into a protein of
the same name that does all sorts of important but – to me and medical science –
mysterious things. In H disease the H
gene has a segment with an abnormal number of the three-nucleotide repeats, CAG
(cytosine, adenine, guanine,) all in a row.
H disease attacks nerves in the brain.
Well, some researchers happened to notice that victims of H
disease rarely, if ever, suffer from cancer.
To explore this observation they infected mice (poor long-suffering little
devils – what would we do without them?) with human ovarian cancer, then turned the
mutant H protein loose on them. And - what
do you know? - the cancer went away. Subsequent
experiments show that it is equally toxic to cancer cells in general. Why this is so is not apparent to me, for
sure, and I suspect not to the researchers either.
Well, we don’t want to save people from cancer only to turn
their brains to mush. Obviously a lot
more money and time, and mice, are required.
But this is intriguing.
As a grumpy aside – why doesn’t Elon Musk spend his
countless millions doing something like curing Huntington’s disease, rather than
putting a damned automobile into orbit?
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