Hello world, and especially our bio teacher! Serene here. Thank you, Huimei, for the mention in the last post. I kind of like serine the amino acid too. I think it has a lovely name. The way it sounds is perfect! :)

And surprise, surprise, for this post, I'm going to do the deficiency of serine! The scientific explanation of the deficiency of serine is really dry and complicated, so being the brilliant person I am; I shall attempt to translate it for the non-doctors.

Firstly, serine is an amino acid. We get amino acids either when our bodies make them, or we get them from our diet. Serine is a non-essential amino acid. This means it can be produced by the body, and thus does not need to be obtained from our diet.

Deficiency of serine is actually caused by the defects in the bio-synthesis of the amino acid L-Serine. Bio-synthesis is, according to Wikipedia, the phenomenon where chemical compounds are produced from simple reagents. Think something like chem test - ionic bonding. Except that unlike chemical synthesis, bio-synthesis often takes place in living organisms and is generally catalysed by enzymes.

Ok, basically the good news is, serine-deficiencies are potentially treatable. The cure is really quite obvious. The serine-deficient victim is given oral doses of serine, or if serine-deficiency is discovered early, when the child is still in the mother's womb, giving the mother doses of serine.

Children with serine-deficiency suffer from neurometabolic symptoms like encephalopathy, mental retardation, spasticity, celebral palsy and many others.







I guess the age-old adage of 'Prevention is better than cure' shouldn't really apply here, since there is, as yet, no effective way of preventing serine-deficiency altogether. We can only try to limit the extent of the symptoms by procuring serine for the victim's body through artificial means.

I suppose there could be a way of fighting serine-deficiency altogether from the whole human race, but it would potentially clash with our stand on bioethics. The way I would choose to be the most efficient to wipe out serine-deficiencies would be eugenics, or if you would agree, the branch of eugenics involving selective breeding.



Serine-deficiency is an inherited disease, and it involves recessive genes, in effect meaning that two set of parent genes are needed for a child to be diagnosed with serine-deficiency. Thus, if we were to want to combat serine-deficiency, a minimum of one parent would have to be serine-deficient free should they want to conceive a child.

In all Mark Haddon and his Curious Incident glory, I have calculated that if two normal parents with one normal gene and one recessive gene were to have a 25% chance of conceiving a child with serine deficiency - then if one parent was free of serine deficiency, none of the children would be diagnosed with serine deficiency.



I realise it would be hard pressed for anyone to be as brilliant at math as Christopher Boone in Curious Incident, but I have constructed a little visual aid to help. Let us imagine Wentworth Miller married Jennifer Love Hewitt. Apart from having the most gorgeous babies ever, should they have 4 children, one would be afflicted with serine-deficiency. This is based on the fact both parents have one normal gene and one recessive gene.



However, let us see what would happen if Wentworth Miller was completely serine-deficiency free.




Their children would be serine-deficiency free! However, it is not a foolproof plan. The third generation of little Millers would still have traces of being serine-deficient. So, ideally if we really wanted to wipe out serine-deficiencies from this planet, both parents would have to have no copies whatsoever of the recessive gene. ie;




However, this would mean in effect, people with any trace of serine-deficiency at all would not be allowed to conceive children. Should they feel their biological clock ticking, they would merely have to turn to adoption, or in-vitro fertilisation. Surely that isn't right either. Children are born as a consequence of the love between a man and a woman. This gives rise to the argument that humans are the product of love between other humans. Though this is not tangible, we could say that much of the inherent love in the hearts of humans is an outcome of this love. Are we to deny the bearers of the serine-deficient gene this love?

We must strike carefully this balance between moral concerns and a hope for a better science. We must not overstep or cross any line, stirring up a hornet's nest between the religious world and the scientific world.

I believe we cannot take over this responsibility from nature. We can immediately assume that upon our takeover, the responsibility would be abused. Should we allow this, one of the first implications would be that we would allow selective breeding for other purposes too. Each society would then use this to its own advantage, and the world would perhaps be overrun with members of a certain race, mental abilities or simply upset the balance of the sexes.

Undesirable, indisputedly.

I think for now, until technology has given us a better tool, we should just live with people with serine-deficiencies and just remember to give them their medicine on time. ^^!

too beautiful ;
22:17;