Brooke the Immortal: An American Child May Hold Secrets to Aging
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Re: Brooke the Immortal: An American Child May Hold Secrets to Aging
#2Amazing story! Two minor details piqued my attention:
* How the journalistic storytelling style is different from the US one. I guess I have grown accustomed to reading NYT and other newspapers here. For example, I don't think the sentence "Other girls her age are driving, going out dancing and sleeping with their first boyfriends" would have been used for a story like this.
* And more importantly this: "Pakula [her doctor] practices in a medical building near the Greenbergs' house. He wears a tie adorned with cartoonish hippopotamuses. A tall stack of paper -- Brooke's file -- sits on his desk. "This can't be lost," says the doctor, placing his hand on the documents. He knows what a treasure the file represents." It's outrageous that they are using paper records to track this girl. At this age of iPads and other amazing handhelds, doctors' offices are still operating in the 1960s.
Re: Brooke the Immortal: An American Child May Hold Secrets to Aging
#3"Brooke holds the key to everything," says Walker. He's anxious to press on with his work, because he feels that his time is running out. But Howard Greenberg is stalling. He has long felt that he is protecting a valuable treasure in his red brick house. He's even hired lawyers to examine the issue of the rights to Brooke's genome.
It saddens me that the state of human genetics in the United States (perhaps elsewhere, but I've only done genetics here) is such that Mr. Greenberg would even have to consider such things.
Re: Brooke the Immortal: An American Child May Hold Secrets to Aging
#4[deleted]
Re: Brooke the Immortal: An American Child May Hold Secrets to Aging
#5I am surprised this hasn't had more attention than the couple articles I've read about Brooke over the last 1-2 years.
One of the worst parts about this (from a scientific standpoint) is probably the waiting game - will this person's DNA eventually mutate, forming cancer or other age related diseases? Are there tests, other than appearance of age related diseases, to determine if she is aging?
[EDIT] VladRussian pointed out that they talked about the length of her telomeres corresponding to her actual age. Hence, she isn't "immortal", but there is something else going on.
Re: Brooke the Immortal: An American Child May Hold Secrets to Aging
#6"The length of the telomeres, on the other hand, corresponds to her actual age. "
how come "immortality" comes to play here?
Re: Brooke the Immortal: An American Child May Hold Secrets to Aging
#7"Brooke holds the key to everything," says Walker. He's anxious to press on with his work, because he feels that his time is running out. But Howard Greenberg is stalling. He has long felt that he is protecting a valuable treasure in his red brick house. He's even hired lawyers to examine the issue of the rights to Brooke's genome. It saddens me that the state of human genetics in the United States (perhaps elsewhere…
You're probably familiar with the case of Henrietta Lacks. Do you happen to know how these things are handled abroad?
Re: Brooke the Immortal: An American Child May Hold Secrets to Aging
#8I think they are obsessing unnecessarily on the semantics of what "development genes" are.
I strongly doubt there is a bright line separating developmental genes from normal steady-state genes. A multicellular organism is one hugely complicated, parallel, state machine. If certain states become unreachable, that doesn't necessarily mean all the genes responsible for those states are no longer doing anything.
Re: Brooke the Immortal: An American Child May Hold Secrets to Aging
#9"The length of the telomeres, on the other hand, corresponds to her actual age. " how come "immortality" comes to play here?
+1 million. She's still aging, she's just not developing
(by aging I mean the kind that kills you. Being an adult does not kill you; being old does.)
Re: Brooke the Immortal: An American Child May Hold Secrets to Aging
#10Interesting. I always thought that living beings age just because they were programmed to do so, because that's how the genetic algorithm works I guess.