I’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of $1000 to communicate their work.
Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
This zone is the Organs Zone. It has scientists studying health and disease in various parts of our bodies. Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
Some that you might have hear of are….
Huntington disease
cystic fibrosis
some kinds of cancer
Fragile X syndrome
muscular dystrophy
Sickle Cell Anemia
…but there really are a lot. The good news is that most of them are very rare!
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My kids have human growth hormone deficiency…they have to have a needle every night to help them grow! That’s a genetic one. Lots of other things have a strong genetic component as well, such as diabetes, obesity (that’s by far the most common one!), and mental disorders.
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All those listed below.
Not sure if technically this belongs with those mentioned, but ask most guys and I’m sure they’d mention “hair loss/ balding” as a disorder! LOL
On a serious note, I actually have a genetic disorder that has been passed down to me, it’s called G6PDH deficiency. It result is an allergy to certain things (I’ll link learnt of it the hard way! I can tell you the story if you’re interested), including aspirin. I’ve post the link to some information below.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glucose-6-phosphate_dehydrogenase_deficiency
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My boss, Dr Hannan, while working in oxford looked into the effect of the environment on huntingtons disease. Huntingtons is a devastating brain disease that develops late in adulthood in those people that carry a mutation in the Huntington gene. Having this mutation means a person will get the disease, their life expectancy will be reduced, and they will experience debilitating motor symptoms and dementia that progressively get worse. And sadly at the moment there is no cure or treatment.
Before we knew how plastic the brain is in adulthood many thought that there was little hope to combat dementia and brain disease later in life.
Using transgenic mice with the Huntington mutation, Dr Hannan housed half in a non stimulating environment, and the other half in an enriched environment with toys and novelty. He showed that the Huntingtons mice that were housed in the enriched environment developed symptoms much later than the mice in non stimulating environments. He could show that even though all mice had a mutation in the Huntington gene, they didn’t all get the disease at the same time. The environment altered the onset.
We still need to know a lot more about huntingtons and how the environment effects this disease but since this Dr Hannan’s study researchers have started to look in human populations for environmental factors in huntingtons. So even the epitome of genetic disorders isn’t purely genetic, the environment can effect genes.
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