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(HealthNewsDigest.com) – We as a society pay a lot of attention to the end results of things, but somewhat ignore the work it took to get there. We admire winners in athletics, performance, and even politics, but often don’t think much about the time and sacrifices put into achieving that final goal.
The same is true with medical research. To make a discovery that is fundamentally useful to patients takes decades of pure research. The process often starts with basic research pursuits only tangentially related to the ultimate discovery followed by careful analysis and publication of results. Then someone with insight into the current needs of medicine needs to review those findings and identify potentially useful discoveries for follow-up work. The discoveries are then used in more applied research, the resulting products of which go through lengthy FDA approval processes involving years of clinical trials, which finally result in a medical advance that receives attention by major media outlets and use by medical practitioners around the world.
This is obviously a long and treacherous road, and it almost always begins with discoveries made in basic research. Here are three examples where basic biological research led to discoveries that had a huge impact on human health.
The Breast Cancer Gene
Researchers working in the field of genetics are focused on understanding how DNA directs the growth and development of an organism. Scientists who study genetics sometimes specialize in the behavior of a particular gene, and at the other end of the spectrum are those who study genomics, which is the study of the behavior of all the genes and how they interact with each other.
Professor Mary-Claire King began her career as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley where she devoted her time doing basic genetics research to demonstrate that one gene, BRCA1, is strongly linked to breast and ovarian cancer, suggesting that 5-10% of breast cancer cases may be hereditary. This discovery has led to millions of dollars raised to millions of dollars raised for the fight against breast cancer, and tens of millions of lives saved.
DNA Sequencing
Microbiology is the study of microscopic living organisms. Microbiologists spend their days collecting samples off of rocks and from the bottom of the ocean then growing them in Petri dishes, studying the organisms that grow. Each newly discovered organism helps to fill in the phylogenetic tree a little more, giving us a more complete picture of life as we know it. However, discovering new organisms can support other scientific discoveries as well.
The most famous example of this is that of Thermus aquaticus, a species of thermophilic bacteria that grows best at 158 degrees Fahrenheit. It was first discovered in 1969 in Yellowstone National Park in the Lower Geyser Basin by Thomas Brock in an effort to catalog the different species capable of living in the extreme environments of natural hot springs. Years later, the enzyme responsible for transforming the entire field of molecular biology, Taq DNA polymerase, was isolated from Thermus aquaticus. It is almost impossible to describe how many discoveries have relied on the use of Taq DNA polymerase in the process called polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Suffice it to say its discovery has allowed the sequencing of the human genome, leading to countless discoveries about the genetic causes of major diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and diabetes and allowing the genetic testing of individuals for genes related to specific diseases like the work done at the Stephen A. Wynn Institute at the University of Iowa.
Antibiotic Resistance Markers
Molecular biologists focus on DNA, RNA, proteins, enzymes, and an assortment of biological small molecules. The field currently relies heavily on PCR in conjunction with another technology made possible by basic research in the area of antibiotic resistance to directly edit the DNA of different organisms, allowing the researchers to study the effects of these DNA edits allowing them to better understand the function of different segments of DNA.
Antibiotic resistance in and of itself is a huge problem for human health, as it means that there are human pathogens in the environment that can no longer be killed by currently available antibiotics. Molecular biologists have taken advantage of the mutations in the pathogens that allow them to be resistant to antibiotics. Researchers take the genes responsible for antibiotic resistance out of the pathogens, fuse them with the genes they want to study, and insert them into “safe” organisms to be studied in the lab. The researchers grow the “safe” organisms with the inserted genes on Petri dishes containing antibiotics, so that only cells containing the resistance gene will grow, allowing for the separation of this new mutant from unmodified cells. This technology allows the studying of the entire genome one gene at a time, leading to important discoveries in the effects of pairs of genes on hereditary diseases.
These are just three examples where simple discoveries from basic research led to major advances in the fields of biology and medicine. Work of this type is done at public and private research universities, research hospitals, and private research institutes throughout the world.
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