Fight Aging!

A couple of articles from the media I thought worth pointing out: firstly, a high level overview of the future of personalized medicine and genetic research.

Ten or 20 years from now, a droplet of blood may be all your doctor needs to catch a cancer in its earliest stages. That droplet could also reveal which genetic diseases you might develop later in life and which medicines, tailored to your genetic makeup, are right for you.

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Hood believes that in 10 to 20 years medicine's focus will have shifted away from treating existing diseases, typically late in their progression, to preventing disease before it sets in.

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What will make this medical revolution possible, according to Hood, is systems biology. This discipline, which is actually a blend of biology, computing and micro/nanotechnology, tries to understand the behavior of a whole, such as the human body, in terms of the interactions among its parts - its genes, proteins and other molecules.

I'm a big fan of the push towards personalized medicine - so many of what are currently top of the line therapies affect different people in very different ways. Medicine is still too often a matter of pulling the big red lever on the side of the complex machine and hoping for the best. Moving from developing therapies on the basis of test results, educated guesses and studies, and towards the model of developing therapies based on exact knowledge of genetics and biochemistry is a revolution that will bring great advances in health and longevity.

Here is another article worth reading from Reason Online: Tim Cavanaugh's views on Proposition 71, the California stem cell ballot measure.

In a characteristic anti-71 argument, Steve Milloy singles out prominent Prop 71 advocate Irving Weissman, whose company StemCells Inc. faces a depressed stock price and would almost certainly get a boost if the ballot initiative passed.

What Milloy doesn't highlight (though a stock analyst he cites does) is that the stock of that company, like that of many biotech plays, has already been affected - negatively - by government interference. Prop 71 proponents point not only to the Bush decision but to Congressional bills introduced by Rep. Dave Weldon (R-Fla.) and Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) that would have criminalized this type of research.

"In 2002 and 2003, when the Weldon bill was in the House of Representatives, Proposition 71 wasn't even a dream," says Robert Klein, chairman of the Yes On 71 Coalition. "The Brownback bill didn't involve public funding at all. The Bush administration has gotten Costa Rica to front a UN bill outlawing this research worldwide. It's initiatives like this that made our own congressional allies to tell us 'We can't hold this dike back forever. You need to get enough funding to scientists so they can show some results.' Historically, public funding has broadened public support."

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This is the kind of topsy-turvy logic public health pieties have left us with. You can't discuss a matter of science in any terminology other than that of public policy and taxpayer money. The future may or may not hold medical breakthroughs due to stem cell research. But it definitely will hold more scientists getting public funds and then complaining about the politicization of science, more demagoguery featuring unborn babies and celebrity patients, and more situations in which even reasonably thrifty and cautious citizens will have to say, "Well, it's only three billion dollars."