Eugenics and Cancer Cures
Will eugenics produce a race of supermen able to cure cancer? Or will societies where people with Down's syndrome “don't get out of the delivery room” overlook potential cancer cures? According to an article in Science Daily:
So… when you read the Fark cliche “still no cure for cancer” …Most cancers are rare in people with Down syndrome, whose overall cancer mortality is below 10 percent of that in the general population. Since they have an extra copy of chromosome 21, it's been proposed that people with Down syndrome may be getting an extra dose of one or more cancer-protective genes.
The late cancer researcher Judah Folkman, MD, founder of the Vascular Biology Program at Children's Hospital Boston, popularized the notion that they might be benefiting from a gene that blocks angiogenesis, the development of blood vessels essential for cancer's growth, since their incidence of other angiogenesis-related diseases like macular degeneration is also lower.
1 Comments:
Don't Downs Syndrome sufferers generally die fairly young? And isn't cancer generally a disease of the old?
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