There’s an invisible, unstoppable menace which will claim one in 300 lives. It will cripple and paralyse its victims slowly and relentlessly and it will eventually kill them. As it did to Mao Zedong, Stephen Hawking, Lou Gehring and a host of others, famous or otherwise. Its generic name is MND, although a glance at our supporting sites[1] [2] will show how experts have divided it into several syndromes.
What is so frustrating is that the cause is still unknown. There may be genetic components; there may be factors like physical or chemical stresses. Somehow the nerves or their myelin sheaths seem to malfunction badly, leading to a catastrophic loss of function which soon brings great suffering to victims and their families. Only research offers any long term hope, but there appears to be relatively little of that, when you compare it to how much is spent on developing new computer games for example.
Why does humanity get its priorities so wrong? What’s so good about a tax cut, if you’re going to spend it on trashy consumer goods which will probably be in a landfill site in a couple of years? Yet money invested in basic scientific research often pays back many times over. We all know how techniques developed to analyse images of star fields were soon transferred to the analysis of medical samples on microscope slides. What would happen if Governments threw money into MND research, apart from curing the disease itself? In the meantime the brave souls of the MND association will continue to brave all weathers, tirelessly campaigning to raise exiguous funds for a few far sighted researchers who are trying to understand this terrible scourge. Please visit their site and if you can, try to make a donation. It will pay off somewhere.
[1] https://www.mndassociation.org/
[2] ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_neuron_disease
#mnd #research #mao zedong #stephen hawking #disease #nervous system
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