If I Could Use Gene Therapy to Cure My Manic-Depression, I Don’t Know Whether I Would
By Tana Wojczuk,
Slate
| 09. 21. 2021
In the final chapter of her 1995 memoir of manic-depression, An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison posed a question that has stayed on my mind ever since: “I have often asked myself whether, given the choice, I would choose to have manic-depressive illness.” The question haunts me because I can’t answer it, either.
When Jamison first posed her question (if there were a cure for my mental illness, would I take it?), it seemed like pure speculation. But the question is no longer so hypothetical.
In June, the journal Nature Reviews Neurology published the results of a wide-ranging study of the genetic roots of manic depression. The study included 40,000 cases and identified a startling 64 genes associated with the disease. (In a clinical setting, the disease is usually referred to as “bipolar disorder,” though I’ve always preferred the more descriptive “manic-depression.”) Studies like this one are part of a burgeoning discipline known as molecular psychiatry, a field that studies the “biological mechanisms underlying psychiatric disorders.” Molecular biologists are also making progress in studies of major (unipolar)...
Related Articles
By Fyodor Urnov, Time | 08.12.2024
After a lifetime in the field of epigenetics, and nearly 20 years after my colleagues and I coined the term “genome editing,” I will be the first to admit that describing the “epigenome”—a marvelous biological process that guides...
By Azeen Ghorayshi and Sarah Kliff, The New York Times | 08.12.2024
An emerging movement against in vitro fertilization is driving some doctors and patients in red states to move or destroy frozen embryos.
The embryo migration is most striking in Alabama, where the State Supreme Court ruled in February that embryos...
By Gemma Conroy, Nature | 06.27.2024
Image by Robina Weermeijer from Unsplash
A molecular-editing tool that’s small enough to be delivered to the brain shuts down the production of proteins that cause prion diseases, a rare but deadly group of neurodegenerative disorders.
The system — known...
By Staff, AP-NORC | 07.12.2024
Image by Dr. Jayesh Amin from Wikimedia Commons licensed under CC by-SA 3.0
Most adults support protecting access to in vitro fertilization, or IVF, a type of fertility treatment where eggs are combined with sperm outside the body in a...