Would a Therapy for Down Syndrome Change Lives For Better or For Worse?
By Sarika Sachdeva This post was written as part of a class assignment from students who took a neuroethics course with Dr. Rommelfanger in Paris of Summer 2016. Sarika Sachdeva is an undergraduate junior at Emory studying Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology and Economics. She is involved with research on stimulant abuse and addiction under Dr. Leonard Howell at Yerkes National Primate Research Center. Researchers around the world are working to develop treatments and cures for all kinds of genetic disorders and abnormalities, but what happens when the people affected by the condition don’t want it taken away? New breakthroughs in treatment are often controversial for non-fatal conditions such as Down Syndrome , which causes inhibited neural communication and leads to learning delays as a result of an extra copy of chromosome 21 ( Rochman, 2015 ). Recently, a study from the Boston University Medical Center claimed to have identified differences in gene expression that ar...