"...The Window Doesn't Close..."

If you have been touched by Matt's account for the hunt of his son's killer, you might be interested in this fascinating talk by Hal Dietz on Rational therapeutics for genetic conditions. 

From the Q&A at the very end of the video:

Question: Are Adults with Marfan syndrome all treatable ?

Hal Dietz: Yeah, so that's a great question. The question is, are adults with Marfan all treatable or is the window of opportunity to make a difference over in childhood ? At least in our mice, we can allow them to become mature adults. They're sexually mature at about two months, by six months of age they are sort of mid-adult life and by a year of age they are old mice. And whether we start treatment right after birth, in the middle of that sequence, or at the end, we see the same kind of benefits. So we think that the window doesn't close, that there is an opportunity even later in life.

[Emphasis added]

Coming back to the engineering and mathematics of it,  whenever faced with this type of thorough presentation, one wonders whether the use of simple sparsity in metabolic network analysis is quite enough. In fact, we probably ought to connect our regularizers with the biochemistry and the sensors at hand..In particular, at every word, I always wonder if the sensors currently used in genomics are in fact answering the pertinent metabolic questions. You really need to also listen to the Q&A at the very end. There is the fascinating answer on the connection between the microscopic knowledge of a pathway and the attendant macroscopic result and the fact that like the plasticity observed for the brain, much of this therapy can take place at any time: "...the window doesn't close...".. I also like the imagery of the island on the first slide, it reminds me of other islands and the pirates that sail to them (What Island Is Next ?). Please note also the accidental discovery process.

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