Word: cystic
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Forty years ago this month, American James Watson and Briton Francis Crick made history when they unraveled the secret of the dna molecule, the genetic blueprint that determines whose eyes are brown, whose physique is round and who is most susceptible to such hereditary diseases as cystic fibrosis and Huntington's disease. The partners, who won a Nobel Prize in 1962, don't get together much anymore, but last week they and a group of distinguished colleagues gathered on Long Island, New York, at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where Watson is now director, to celebrate the anniversary of their...
...identification of disease genes has already resulted in the development of tests for such disorders as cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy; people from families with histories of these diseases can now be tested for the faulty gene long before any symptoms show up. But little testing has been done so far because the diseases are relatively rare and the results are merely informative; no cure is yet available, and if the test is positive, there is little action the recipient can take, except to avoid having children, who might inherit the gene...
...technique -- which begins with in vitro, or "test-tube," fertilization and then involves plucking a single cell from an embryo the size of a grain of sand -- has already produced a healthy baby girl for a British couple with a 1 in 4 chance of having a child with cystic fibrosis, according to a report in last week's New England Journal of Medicine. It is now being used to detect several inherited ailments, including hemophilia, Duchenne muscular dystrophy and Tay-Sachs disease...
...Hammersmith Hospital, led by Alan Handyside and Robert Winston, perfected a technique for drawing cells into hair-thin pipettes one at a time. Then they teamed up with a group from Houston's Baylor College of Medicine and Methodist Hospital who had developed a procedure for rapidly spotting the cystic fibrosis defect in a single strand of DNA, using the gene- cloning technique called polymerase chain reaction. "It's like finding one typographical error in a book 180 times the size of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in about six hours," says Dr. Mark Hughes, director of Baylor's Prenatal Genetics Center...
...experiment reported last week involved an English husband and wife who already had a child with cystic fibrosis and were worried about having another. Doctors followed the standard in vitro fertilization protocol, using hormones to stimulate the production of extra eggs, which were then mixed with sperm in a Petri dish. Two of the resulting embryos tested positive for cystic fibrosis. The rest were O.K., and two of them were implanted in the mother's womb. One became Chloe O'Brien, a healthy child who will neither get cystic fibrosis nor pass it on to her offspring...