Could genes be our link to eliminating cancer? Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee offers hope

Imagine this. You want to have a baby, and because of whatever reasons, IVF is what you are looking at. Now, what if the embryo, before being implanted into your womb, could have its genome sequenced?

What if doctors and scientists could look at the gene sequence of the embryo, check if any genes make it predisposed to cancer, and then arrange a sequence to eliminate that gene.

Sounds right out of fiction, doesn't it? It isn't actually. It's what Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee, Padma Shri, and Pulitzer Prize Winner for his book The Emperor of All Maladies - A Biography of Cancer, said at a recent interaction in Delhi.

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Talking about cancer and how the future could be dealing with this emperor of maladies, Dr Mukherjee, who is a physician, scientist, professor, and writer, said a recent trial in China had actually tried genome sequencing on 77 human embryos.

It's also the topic of his second and new book, The Gene: An Intimate History, which debuted at No 1 on The New York Times bestseller list, and talks about what is likely to become of humans if we learn to decode and code (read and write) our own genetic information.

In response to a question, I raised about natural conception and whether cancer tests were foreseeable in the future (such as double and triple markers for autism spectrum disorder), that would allow parents to take a decision on aborting a foetus depending on how prone it was to cancer, Dr Mukherjee said such tests already exist.

However, the question they pose is how do parents decide how much risk they're willing to take. For example, if you found the risk was ten per cent, would you keep the child? Or what if it were 20 per cent?

As diseases like cancer continue to envelop the world, these are questions all of us are going to grapple with.

It was believed that by finding the environmental carcinogens that cause cancer (such as tobacco), and eliminating them, we'd be able to eliminate cancer, but that hasn't happened.

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There are still many, many cases, says Dr Mukherjee, that are not caused by known carcinogens. According to him, a paper that's caused a lot of storm in the scientific community and was published by researchers from Johns Hopkins says, after statistical analysis, which many cancers are caused by fate or bad luck ("Bad Luck of Random Mutations Plays Predominant Role in Cancer, study shows").

Basically, our cells are dividing all the time and sometimes there are mistakes in cell division, which causes cancer. If that's not plain bad luck, what is?

While scientists argue it out, the interest in gene therapy will obviously grow.

Forget cancer or any other disease, seeing how obsessed parents are with having perfect kids, genome sequencing also raises the whole debate about having designer babies, which will take human narcissism up several notches.

What will eventually unfold? Who knows.

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)