Daniel U. Flores

Biology of Disease

Dr. Jonathan Karpel

Introduction

At the beginning of the semester it was hard for me to understand how certain topics were related. The topics of brain and gene therapy, in specific, were hard for me to connect but now I can see how they are linked to each other. In order for us to better comprehend how each topic relates to each other we must first try to understand the primary functions of the mind and gene therapy.

The Brain

Reading about the brain was a bit more challenging because the brain is a very complex organ and we don't fully understand how it works. Mental health is a very difficult topic, most of us are uneducated in the topic and do not know how to interact with individuals that have a mental illness. According to Mental Health America one in four people in the world will be affected by mental or neurological disorders at some point in their lives. Around 450 million people currently suffer from such conditions, placing mental disorders among the leading causes of ill-health and disability worldwide. Currently, when we interact with someone that has a mental disability, we do not know how to interact with them. Sometimes we whisper to them because we think they have a mental illness and they must be violent, easily irritable or excitable, or we speak slowly because people with a mental illness are not as smart as the rest of us. We need to stop treating people with a mental illness as a person, not as an illness.

Sometimes when I do math, physics or anything related to numbers I like to play YouTube videos on the background because I do not have to concentrate as hard as when I read. I was watching a video called “The Mind of Jake Paul”, this series of videos put an emphasis on sociopaths and whether or not Jake Paul is as a sociopath. The whole video in my opinion was a misrepresentation of mental health illness because they are trying to exploit mental health for their own monetary gain. What surprised me the most about the video was that a medical professional, Kati Morton, referred to a sociopath or sociopathic behavior as creepy and gross. Kati Morton said, "isn't that creepy, it's so creepy, we are going to have to take a shower after this"(minute 13:50) and then again "Its really gross, it's really creepy” (Minute 22:27)https://youtu.be/vTLkSpY_aYg?t=830 (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

Seeing this insensible response from a medical professional made me question the type of help available for those with a mental disability. I think that in order to provide better treatment we need more extensive research on how to diagnose and treat mental illness but we also need to understand its source and roots.

The hippocampus is a structure that plays an important role in learning, however, when the brain is exposed to a traumatic experience physiological hyperarousal may make memories difficult to regulate. This irregularity of memories could become permanent and lead to intrusive thoughts and nightmares, or suppression, inability to recall memories, or selective amnesia. As a society we need to be understanding of those with mental illness, we also need to find ways to provide the medical treatment they deserve, we also need to support organizations that do research in the field and also associations that provide help for those with mental illness.

Gene Therapy

I try to listen to podcasts in the mornings before I go to school, and one discussed a new discovery that claims the heart beats earlier than was previously thought. The discovery claimed that the heart began to form 3 weeks following conception but new technology has proven that this process occurs even earlier. They explain that there are specific cells predestined to form the heart. It is amazing that to know that cells already know that they're going to be cardiac cells.

The other subtopic was, why don't elephants get cancer? This is a topic from which I have gained extensive knowledge. Researchers believe that the answer to how cancer develops or not lies in how big you are, the more cells you have the less likely for one of those cells to become cancerous. There are genes called the oncogenes and when they are mutated, they cause cancer. There are also genes that are called tumor suppressors and their job is to suppress the formation of tumors. We found that for this one special kind of tumor suppressor, they had 20 copies whereas every other animal they looked only had one. If we could isolate those tumor suppressors and test their effectiveness in other organisms, we could develop suppressants for cancer cells. This is a remarkable discovery and I hope more research is put into this subject because this can be applied to patients with oral cancer when its detected in early stages.

This is also an interesting discovery that could lead a more precise and effective treatments; tumor suppressants could revolutionize the way we treat cancer today. We could edit the genes of these suppressants using CRISPR and introduce them to mice. The results could very because each species is different, however, if we can understand the pathway and mechanism on a small subject, we can gain a better understanding and predict future interactions of the suppressant with other species.

            The use of CRISPR could revolutionize the way we treat certain diseases. The ability of CRISPR to modify the human genome may create the possibility of curing genetic diseases. Austen Roxanne Yeager makes an interesting point of certain circumstances in which CRISPR is of great benefit for patients with disease that shorten life, such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy, Huntington’s disease, Tay-Sachs disease, and Cystic Fibrosis. It is understandable to feel uncomfortable by the idea of changing the genetic material of a human being but in certain circumstances this process is undoubtedly necessary. In today's society, most medical treatments are designed for the average patient. Precision medicine in combination with CRISPR, on the other hand, matches each patient with the treatment that will work best for them. Precision medicine takes individual variation into account: variation in our genes, environment, lifestyle, and even in the microscopic organisms that are living inside of us. DNA sequencing is the process of determining the precise order of your genetic code. Using rapid, inexpensive DNA sequencing, scientists are finally gaining a solid understanding of human genetic variation and how some of those variations impact health.

With this information, doctors will be better able to make more precise diagnoses and offer more targeted treatments. When a critically ill infant has an unknown disorder, the quick diagnosis can be the difference between life and death. The current state of medical care seems to be very general and standard. We are in an age where new technologies are being developed to be more precise and effective, but they are currently very expensive. There is also the influence of private parties and corporations that want to make the most money of their current investments. More research needs to be done to completely understand the mechanism of each disease, we need to understand the pathway and possible side effects of editing or changing DNA. A market adjustment is also necessary, adjusting the market forces that currently limit the growth of this game-changing approach to disease would give access and availability to those who are in need of the treatment, changing lives while potentially reinventing what medical care can achieve.

Conclusion

There are no signs that gene therapy could be used to treat mental health illness any time soon; However, there are certain studies with animal subjects that are very promising to treat several psychiatric disorders including drug addiction, affective disorders, psychoses and dementia. Future techniques could be mastered and perfected but human trials would give rise to many moral and ethical problems. Ayurveda would play an important role in the balance between medical procedures and the well-being of each individual.