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...double helix comprising four nucleotides entwined in the code of all life, thereby opening the first chapter in the saga of molecular biology. Then in 2001 two competing scientific teams produced a draft of the human genome, introducing a new therapeutic era in which medical professionals may be able to slow human aging and make celebrating 100th birthdays almost routine.
No one can predict the precise extent or timing of advances in molecular biology. No one can know exactly when particular diseases will be prevented or cured. No one can foresee when, or even if, human aging will be slowed or stopped. No one yet knows for sure whether humans' genetic makeup limits life span or, if it does, what those limits might be. Some families include more nonagenarians and centenarians than any roll of nature's dice could explain, a fact that suggests genes' powerful influence on longevity'. Even if life span is now limited, molecular biology may reveal that these limits are not fixed and may provide ways to slow aging and prevent or cure illnesses that cause physical decline and death.
Scientific advance has revolutionized man's centuries-old assault on human illness. Physicians have long understood, in some sense, the basis of successful medical treatments, without being able to penetrate the underlying processes by which their interventions worked. The fundamental reasons wiry antibiotics killed pathogens, for example, remained for years as mysterious to the discoverers of those drugs and to the physicians who used them as they were to the patients whose lives they saved.
As the 21st century begins, scientists are increasingly working from a fundamental understanding of cells, proteins, and genes to design interventions that reverse, block, or otherwise forestall illnesses. In the words of Nobel Prize winner Alfred Gilman, scientists are now "able to complete [their] understanding of the wiring diagram of" the signaling switchboard in each type of cell." With that knowledge in hand, they now have--or soon will--the means to design drugs or to directly change how cells operate to correct the genetic defects each person inherits or acquires during life from mutations or other sources.
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