Science Research: Zeroing in on Quality of Life

I look forward to a great future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose. I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment... an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft... I look forward to an America which commands respect throughout the world not only for its strength but for its civilizations as well. And I look forward to a world which will be safe not only for democracy and diversity but also for personal distinction.

John F. Kennedy Several scientific disciplines within ASU are zeroing in on still more breakthroughs that, in the next 30 to 35 years, will drastically affect health and quality of life problems. Few have attracted more attention than genetic engineering, and it is a distinct possibility, in the opinion of Dr. Jack Levy, a research associate in ASU's departments of Botany/ Microbiology and Zoology, that in 30 years he will have attained the understanding and skill to grow a human being from a single cell. But, through the same techniques, to achieve aims that, for the living, have more immediacy: for one, the ability to correct Nature's errors as soon as they are detectable in the womb.

"It is an important thing that we expect to see as a reality in the next 30 to 35 years to correct inborn errors of metabolism, congenital, and hereditary diseases. We want to replace those defective genes with good copies of the genes...to match them in such a way that they are introduced at the right time in the development process, and to rectify things like dwarfism, sickle-cell anemia, and so forth. Our ability to identify growth defects, such as Down's Syndrome, has already taken a substantial leap forward. Also well within the realm of reality in 30 years, Dr. Levy feels: the replacement of both organs and limbs after the human has left the womb.

"Some animals do it naturally-the lizard replacing a lost tail...a newborn infant regenerating a joint of a finger...the ability of some adults to regenerate a considerable portion of their liver. Why is it that the genes necessary for growing an arm or a leg early in development are no longerable to do it later? It's entirely possible, in the next 30 years, to program these genes so that a limb-a lost arm or leg-can be regenerated even in an adult. It would hold out a tremendous hope for a lot of people. After all, even after five years of regeneration, the adult with such a new arm would have a limb-the size of that on a five-year-old child-that is quite functional for many things."

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But no less exciting, 30 to 35 years away, is the branch of genetic engineering that "envisions the cloning of genes into microbes and getting products which, in the normal productive cycle, would be produced in very small quantities, in high quantity and relatively inexpensively. Human insulin, four years ago, was the first major commercial application of this sort of cloning. And the potential in agriculture-to grow any number of perfect plants from a single plant cellis staggering."

But not all improvements in the human body's ability to cope with life, in or out of the womb, will come from the genetic engineer's test tube cloning of genes. Consider the role of the lowly battery. "The pacemaker-type battery," according to Dr. Bruce Wagner, director of ASU's Center for Solid State Sciences, "already has a reliable life of about 10 years, so it's very, very good as it is. But what we're going to see in the next few years will go considerably beyond that to a pacemaker with integrated circuitry that will anticipate the need of the heart's rate. Today's pacemaker tells the heart when to beat, of course, and some of them can be manually changed with a magnet when, for some reason-like a game of tennisyou need a faster beat. But, well within 30 years, this will be obsolete. The pacemaker

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You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side. Gladstone under the skin, will anticipate the heart's need to change the rate and will do it automatically without the user having to give it a thought.

And, on the same principle, Dr. Wagner adds, "glucose sensors are also going to revolutionize medicine-pumping insulin, when needed, into the body of the diabetic, and in the right amount, in the same way the pacemaker will sense the needs of the heart."

It is 60 million B.C. and in the warm waters that will later recede and leave exposed the barren landscape of Black Mesa and the Chuska Mountains over northeastern Arizona, the ponderous ichthyosaurus, the slender-snouted airbreathing predecessor of today's whales and porpoises, lazily probes the depths for cuttlefish. Ashore, its brethren in that Mesozoic epoch, the giant tyrannosauria, battle among themselves for survival-a survival that evolution was to deny them.

"And we have strong reason to believe, from the fossilized remains of these dinosauria," Dr. G. Robert Pettit, director of ASU's Cancer Research Institute, says matter-of-factly, "that many of these giant reptiles had a form of bone cancer, even then."

The dread disease, cancer-claiming 500,000 lives a year in the United States, alone, and perhaps 10 million worldwide, and now, at least, in its 60-millionth year, "will certainly be well under control in the next 30 to 35 years," he adds confidently.

"And I'm not speaking of the ability to bring cancer to remission. I'm speaking of cures."

In terms of time and the Earth, what do 30 to 35 years constitute? Less than the blink of an eye.

"I think most people don't fully realize the extent of the progress that, in 1984, has already been made," the director of the privately funded, important research arm of the U.S. National Cancer Institute says. "Of the 150 strains of cancer, we already have cures for 13 of them-and that equates to about 50,000 lives a year that wouldn't otherwise have been saved through either surgery or radiation. In the next 10 years the number of cures will double, at least. And, by 2019, according to the re-searcher who, even prior to 1957, "was absolutely convinced that all forms of cancer would be curable," the dream will be realized.

"I'm not saying that in the next 30 to 35 years we will fully understand the intricate chemistry of cancer, and people, of course, will still contract it. What I'm saying is that we'll cure it before we fully understand the chemistry-which is true of most medical problems. The best analogy to cancer is pneumonia, which used to kill 25 million people a year. When was the last time you heard of anyone, since antibiotics, dying of pneumonia? Only in those rare cases where treatment wasn't available.

"It's one of the big fallacies of our times," Dr. Pettit adds, "that we have to understand the nature and the causes of an illness before we can cure it. It's ridiculous and becomes a moot point. There's still an awful lot about pneumonia that we don't