An Unwanted Future.

This is a story of Jill Viles, a young woman with muscular dystrophy. This young woman has had troubles with her muscles all of her life, at the age of only 12 she was unable to ride a bike or keep up with any of her classmates in physical activities. as she got older, she loss her ability to walk and other such luxuries. Her rare type of dystrophy had gone diagnosed until very late; the only reason it happened at all was because of Jill. The doctors knew she had a form of muscular dystrophy but the exact type was not something they could figure out, so Jill took to the books and started her own research. After months and months of looking she finally found it, but the doctors did't believe her. It took another 5 years for a specialist to look and see she was correct. After this you would think she would stop digging, but you'd be wrong she and she found another picture in a medical book, she knew at this point she had a second disease. the likelihood of having either of these diseases were 1 in millions but the odds of having both were to the point that no one on Earth should have ever been able to get them both. After a family get together, her sister showed her a photo of Priscilla Lopes, an Olympic Hurdler. At first Jill didn't see the connection, but after further examination she did see it, they had the same definitions of muscles, although Jill's were quite smaller. Genetic testing showed that they both had the rare Disease that caused fat in their body to waste away, but, where Jill had one of her nucleotides switched from a C to a G, Priscilla had the nucleotide next to that switched from a T to an A. One nucleotide, a distance of 0.34 nano meters, caused Jill to lose her ability to walk and Priscilla's muscles to balloon in size and strength.

This story brings to light how fragile we all are, on a nuclear level that is, one genetic mistake can literally be a life or death situation. It could also mean nothing, around 98% of DNA is 'non-coding' which means mutations in these regions will cause no damage at all. It's a good thing that most of the mutations don't cause Diseases because on average every child gets about 60 mutations during the process of contraception.

In this new day and age, scientists are getting better and better with genetic mutations, in fact in this week alone ( week of January 22 2017) geneticists have successfully grown a rat organ in a mouse, and transplant it into a rat as well as growing human cells in a pig. These steps are going in a direction I'm not sure everyone is ready for; Genetically modified people. There are obvious upsides, no more genetic diseases, people who are faster, stronger, better. Even that is getting a bit weird but when you go into it, getting pregnant could be a lot different, instead of an ultrasound, you are picking the features you want your kid to have, blue eyes, tall or short boy or girl. Its easy to dismiss this as a science fiction fantasy but it has been speculated we could see these changes implemented as soon as 2025. It can be a scary thought but taking it back to its root it could do a lot of good, for example miscarriages. My family has person suffered from a loss by this and a technology that this would provide would allow for people to no longer have to deal with that. It could also cause large gaps in humans, these procedures would be expensive, not available to the majority of people. That would mean the top 1% isn't only more rich but also at a point where they are physically superior to the rest of us, more inteligent that the rest of us, that is scary, its terrifying actually. but what are we going to do? this technology is becoming a reality and because of we as a society need to be thinking about it a lot more than we currently are.