The Human Evolution of Why We Need Disease free essay sample

Continues to work as a researcher while finishing medical training at New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Jonathon Price, senior adviser and speechwriter in the Clinton House and oversaw communications strategy at NATO during the war in Kosovo. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Dr. Sharon Moalem, Harper Collins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street , New York, NY 10022. Abstract This paper explores the concepts on a Medical Maverick discovering why we need disease. About the mysteries and miracles, wondering why, and why not. The article, however, vary in the understanding of science and the history of science. The scientific points the Dr. Sharon Moalem, analyzing the evidence used to support the scientific points found in the Survival of the Sickest (2007) in creating feelings of closeness or intimacy. Other books, define the evolution of human differently, and therefore offering different results, and theories. Examining the strengths, and weakness of the significant terms of both a historical, and methodology content. We will write a custom essay sample on The Human Evolution of Why We Need Disease or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page This paper examines Dr. Sharon Moalem with the help of Jonathon Price (2007) research in relation to the complexities of survival, in the human evolution. Survival of the Sickest: The Human Evolution A Review in Science In 2007, Dr. Sharon Moalem called attention to discover why we need disease in the human evolutional world. Dr. Sharon Moalem thought of the complexities of survival after his grandfather was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, when he was fifteen years old. 1) Watching somebody you love drift away is hard to accept. \ You start to want answers, and you want to know why. So he started researching the concept of the human evolutionary concepts, and what the human body takes to fight off disease ironing out plagues, cancerous cells, and the power of cholesterol, the gene pool, and methyl madness. Analyzing the evidence used to support these scientific points, also how reading this book contribute to your understanding of science and the history of science. While the traditional response to a medical epidemic is to hunt for a vaccine or a cure-all pill, these scientific points are more elusive. Understanding the limitations of the evolution for humans highlights the complexity of the human gene types and the understanding of the human body. Can we Rust to Death? Aran Gordon was a born competitor, he was training for the Marathon des Sables, he started to feel tired all the time, joints hurt, and his heart seem to skip a funny beat. After going to doctors, Gordon couldn’t account for his symptoms or they drew the wrong conclusion. Finally after three years, the doctors uncovered the real problem, Gordon was having an massive amount of iron in his blood and liver – off thee charts amount of iron. Aran Gordon was rusting to death. Hemochromatosis is a hereditary disease that disrupts the way the body metabolizes iron. Normally a persons body detects when it has a sufficient iron level in the blood, reducing the amount of iron absorbed by the intestines from the food that human digest. So even if you suffer yourself with iron supplements so wouldn’t load up with excess iron in your blood system. But for a human with Hemochromatosis, the body thinks, always, that the body doesn’t are enough iron and continues to absorb iron unabated. Over loading of iron can lead to damaging of the joints, the major organs, and overall body chemistry. However, unchecked Hemochromatosis can lead to liver failure, heart failure, diabetes, arthritis, infertility, psychiatric disorders, and even cancer, also leading to death. For more than 125 years after Armand Trousseau first described it in 1865, Hemochromatosis was thought to be extremely rare. (2). However, in 1996, the primary gene that causes the condition was isolated, discovering that the genes Hemochromatosis are common in people of Western European descents. (3). Genetics Parlance, the degree that a given gene manifests itself in an individual is called penetrance. (4) If a single gene meaning everyone that have attracted ear lopes, that genes has a high or complete penetrance. However, a gene that consists of a host of circumstances to manifest, also like the gene Hemochromatosis been considered to have low penetrance. Now here’s a question, why would a disease so deadly bred into our genetic code? Hemochromatosis isn’t an infectious disease caused by bad habits like smoking getting lung cancer, or smallpox caused by a viral invader. The plague known has the Black Death during 1347 to 1350 brought the most deadly outbreak of bubonic plagues to Western Europe? People with the hemochromatosis mutation were resistant to the infection, because of their iron starved macrophages. While people without the mutation, where more prong to the disease and its deadly side effects. If the first generation was help because of the hemochromatosis mutation, to survive the plague, multiplying its frequency across the population as a result, successive outbreaks compounded, further breeding the mutation into the Northern and Western European populations every time a plague resurfaces. The new understanding of hemochromatosis, infection, an iron has provoked a reevaluation of two long-established medical treatments one very one, and one recently new. Bloodletting is one of the oldest, complicated medical practices in history, mostly the Western medicine. This practice was derived from the thinking of the Greek physician Galen, who practiced the theory of the four humours – blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm. (6). All illness resulted from an imbalanced of four humours, and it was the doctor’s job to balance the floes through fast, purging, and bloodletting. An illustration from a 1506 book on medicine points to forty-three different places on the human body that should be used for bleeding, fourteen on the head alone. (7) For centuries, the place to go for bloodletting was the barber shop in the West. Modern medicine science has been skeptical of bloodletting for many reasons. After millennia of bloodletting, it fell into extreme disfavor at the beginning of the twentieth century. Iron is good. The thought of iron to be good and the more was the better. A doctor name John Murray was working with in wife in a Somali refugee camp, hen he noticed that the nomads were free of visible infection. (8). John Murray decided to treated one side of the population with iron first. Treating the nomads with iron supplements increase the disease chance for survival, understanding this, in understood that the nomads were withstanding the disease because of their anemia. It was basically iron locking in high gear. However, hemochromatosis and anemia aren’t the only heredity diseases that have gained pride of place in our gene pool by offering protection from another threat, and they’re not all related to iron. Cystic Fibrosis, that affects different parts of the body. New researchers suggest that, sure enough, carrying a copy of the gene that cause fibrosis seem to offer some protection from tuberculosis. Tuberculosis, which has also been called consumption because of the way it seems to consume the body from the inside out. (9) Aran Gordon manifested symptoms of hemochromatosis; put him through three years of progressive health problems, frustrating tests and inaccurate conclusion before finally learning what was wrong with him. Today he knows the effects of the most common genetic disorder in people of European descent. 10) Today Aran’s health has been restored through bloodletting, on of the oldest medical practices on earth. However, making today an understanding on much more about the complex interrelationship of our bodies, iron, infection, and conditions like hemochromatosis and anemia. (11) Cholesterol on the Rise Isn’t It Everybody knows that humanity’s relationship with the sun is multifaceted. As we learned in school, the entire global ecology of our plant depends on the sufficient of sunlight, beginning with the production of oxygen by plants through photosynthesis. As we have learned to much sun can be such a bad thing on a global level on any individual one, by causing drought and a deadly disease called skin cancer. Many humans don’t know that sun is just as important on an individual, biochemical level. Natural sunlight simultaneously helps the body develop vitamin D and destroy reserves of folic acid. Vitamin D is a critical component of human biochemistry, especially to ensure the growth of healthy bones in children and the maintenance of healthy bones in adults. Without enough vitamin D, dults are prone to osteoporosis and children are prone to a disease called rickets that result in improper bone growth and deformity. We don’t have to rely on fortified milk for vitamin D; most of vitamin D can be made by the body. We make Vitamin D by converting cholesterol, something sun has been getting a bad rap, 100 percent necessary to survival. Cholesterol is required to make and maintain cell membranes, helping the brain send messages, and the immune system to protect us against cancer and other disease. It’s a key building block in the production of estrogen and testosterone and other hormones, making it the essential component in our manufacture of Vitamin D. The skin is the largest organ in the human body, it’s an organ in every sense of the word, responsible for important functions related to the immune system, the nervous system, the circulatory system, and metabolism, protecting the body’s stores of folate, and the skin that a crucial step in manufacturing of vitamin d takes places. 27) When exposed to the right kind of sunlight, our skin converts our cholesterol into vitamin D, using the sunlight ultraviolet B, or UVB, which is essentially, making this the strongest when the sun is more or less directly overhead, for a few hours, everyday beginning around noon. Just as sunscreen block the ultraviolet ray, that gives suntan, is also blocks the ultraviolet rays you need for vitamin D. Australia recently embarked on an anti-skin cancer campaign it called â₠¬Å"Slip-Slop-Slap. (28a) The Campaign was especially effective at producing unintended results _ Australian sun exposure went down, and Australian vitamin D deficiencies went up. (28b) However, researchers discovered that tanning can actually help people who have vitamin D deficiencies. Crohn’s disease is a disorder that includes significant inflammation of the small intestine. (29). However, the inflammation impairs the absorption of nutrients; including vitamin D, making most people with Crohn’s disease has vitamin D deficiencies. As everybody knows the skin is the largest organ of the human body. It responsible for important functions related to the immune system, the nervous system, the circulatory system, and metabolism. Skin color is determined by the amount and type of melanin, a specialized pigment that absorbs light, produced by our bodies. Which means the darker your skin is, the less ultraviolet light it absorbs. The melanocytes of most African, for example, produce many times amount of melanin that the melanocytes of Northern Europeans produce – and most of it is eumelanin, the brown or black version. (30) Melanin also determines hair and eye color, the more melanin, the darker the hair and eyes. The milk white skin of an albino is caused by an enzyme deficiency that results in the production of little or no melanin. (31) As everybody knows, skin color changes, to some extent, in response to sun exposure, making the trigger for that response is the pituitary gland. More than 60,000 Americans are diagnosed with melanoma – especially aggressive type of skin cancer – every year, making Europeans Americans are ten to forty times as likely to get melanoma as African Americans. (32) In 2000, an anthropologist name Nina G. Jablonski and a geographic computer specialist named George Chaplin combine their scientific disciplines to chart the connection between skin cool and sunlight. (33a) They produced an equation to express the relationship between a given population’s skin color and its exposure to ultraviolet rays. (33b). Amusingly, their research also proposes that we carry sufficient genes within our gene pool to ensure that, within 1,000 years of a population migration from one climate to another, its descendants would have the skin color dark enough to protect folate or light enough to maximize vitamin D production. If you are wondering how people with dark skin still make enough vitamin D despite the fact that their skin blocks all those ultraviolet rays, you are on the right path. When ultraviolet rays penetrate the skin it destroys folate, letting the rays the penetrate the skin create vitamin D. So thus cause a new problem for dark skin people, even when they live in sunny climates, getting a good amount of sun. The skin color that protects the folate in the body would prevent them for stocking up on vitamin D. There’s a little guy called apolipoprotein (ApoE4), a gene pool off dark-skinned population groups.