Word: cystic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sperm and implanting resulting embryos in the mother's womb. The main difficulty is that only one in ten tries results in a birth. Yet the success rate may improve, and prefertilization diagnosis could someday be used to intercept defective genes that cause such diseases as Tay-Sachs, cystic fibrosis and thalassemia...
...often as possible) and dramatically clumsy. A re-creation of the near crash of an American Airlines DC-10 in 1972 featured the original pilot and one flight attendant (now 17 years older) playing themselves, not very convincingly. Another story recounted the ordeal of a woman, nearly paralyzed with cystic fibrosis, who spent 16 years neglected in a mental institution. The piece was light on facts and heavy on sensationalism: the asylum scenes looked like outtakes from The Snake...
With this insight, scientists could more accurately predict an individual's vulnerability to such obviously genetic diseases as cystic fibrosis and could eventually develop new drugs to treat or even prevent them. The same would be true for more common disorders like heart disease and cancer, which at the very least have large genetic components. Better knowledge of the genome could speed development of gene therapy -- the actual alteration of instructions in the human genome to eliminate genetic defects...
...have managed to draw rough maps of all the chromosomes. They determine the approximate site of the genes, including many associated with hereditary diseases, by studying patterns of inheritance in families and chopping up their DNA strands for analysis. With this technique, they have tracked down the gene for cystic fibrosis in the midsection of chromosome 7, the gene for a rare form of colon cancer midway along the long arm of chromosome 5, and the one for familial Alzheimer's disease on the long arm of chromosome...
...order or sequence of the four chemicals -- adenine, guanine, thymine and cytosine -- that make up the DNA chains. So far, only about 600 genes have been sequenced. Information from these efforts is expected to help in developing diagnostic tests and even cures for the 3,500 disorders such as cystic fibrosis and sickle-cell anemia that are known to be caused by genetic defects, and those in which heredity has a major influence, including heart disease and cancer...