Curated Paper #2 - Brain, microbes, and gene therapy

Adam Beales

Professor Karpel

BIOL 4500- Biology of Disease

Curated Paper #2 – Brain, microbes, and Gene Therapy

            The brain that humans have is an amazing and powerful tool. Our brains have allowed us to accomplish truly remarkable feats. The things we have created a world that is efficient and allows humans to grow and create more things that will help us. However, if something happens to our brain it can be catastrophic. Any number of things can happen like dementia, epilepsy, Huntington’s disease, depression, and anxiety. Looking at mental disorders, I used to think of people who are mentally unstable and are harmful to others or self-destructive. The example that instantly drew to my mind is depression. Growing up I thought a lot of mental disorders were the person’s fault and all they have to do is change the way they view their life and their life will get better. I later learned that with a lot of disorders it has less to to do with the way the view the world, but more about something biological inside of their bodies that cause the mental disorder. The discussions/lectures in this class have definitely proven that the diseases aren’t simply a state of mind. This is actually a big deal to know because it changes drastically how I viewed people with disorders. I used to think people were looking for attention, lazy, and causing their own pain on purpose. This made me look down on people with those disorders. Now that I know differently, I don’t look down on them.

            After reading the symptoms of many different mental disorders, many have very similar symptoms like becoming angry quickly, defects in memory, and judgement.  A lot of these diseases are still being studied because we don’t know why they exist. We’ve made a lot of progress on these diseases, but are still not close to a cure. We have found that a lot of these diseases are hereditary based on family history. I fear memory disorders because my grandmother has a developing memory disease. My grandma has met my finance seven times and each time I have to introduce her. It makes me extremely sad because my soon to be wife is such a big part of my life and my grandma won’t ever know who she is. Her having this makes it more likely that I am likely to get a memory disorder when I get older.

There is a discussion if there is a difference between the terms mind and brain. Often in health care there are those that use the terms synonymously. Because the brain creates thoughts (the mind), they make no distinction between the two words. However, there are important differences between these words. The mind is developed through environmental, and psychosocial factors and changed by psychotherapy. The brain composed of genetic and biological factors and changed through medication. The brain and the mind have a very complicated relationship because each one affects the other. Serious damage physically or mentally can drastically change how a person acts and thinks.

There are things that can affect the brain’s development are microbes. We learned in class that we are now learning that there is an effect of microbes, especially gut microbes, on the brain. Momma always told us to eat our veggies because it would make our bodies strong. Just as certain foods help our bodies, having certain microbes can do the same.

Microbes have many roles in our bodies. One important role is in our digestion. They help us break down foods so that we can maximize the nutrients and energy we get out of them. Although microbes are important. Sometimes they can be detrimental to our health if they get out of balance. If a species of bacteria outcompetes another bacterium and leads to a disruption of balance, we can get very sick and get diseases. For example, if the body has a large composition of the bacteria Helicobacter hepaticus it has been shown to be a cause in prostate cancer.

Examining microbes has been extremely helpful in our studies of genes. With faster life cycles than most mammals it allows us to see the effects of certain genes in a much shorter amount of time than working with larger organisms. An extremely revolutionary thing we have learned is CRISPR gene therapy. This work has given us the potential to eliminate a lot of genetic diseases. This has the potential to change humans as we know them. CRISPR doesn’t just eliminate a genetic disease in that one individual, it eliminates it from their offspring as well. It has the potential to literally eradicate a disease.

There are some things that I believe we should do before allowing CRISPR to be conducted on large scale with gamete cells. There needs to be many experiments done to see the unforeseen consequences. We don’t want to eliminate one disease from our populations but ensure another more devastating one. As well as we need to be careful to not allow it to go further than genetic diseases for now. After genetic disease are properly controlled, then we could look into the possibility of designer babies. There would have to be lots of discussion and a majority consensus on rules and regulations before it would be available to the general population. I think designer babies would require more rules and regulations than fixing genetic diseases because with a genetic disease there is a clear goal in mind and once it’s reached that’s the end of it. With designer babies there are potentially limitless possibilities and many things would need to be researched because things like affecting the pigment in your skin can result in higher skin cancer rates. Possibly combining two traits results in a different disease. I think it’s a possibility but it should be slower to get to that point than eliminating genetic diseases.