Patients And Scientists example essay topic

Current biomedical research defines the future of patient health care. It provides us with vaccines, gene therapies, drugs, and chemo therapies. It has supplied us with a means to diagnose our diseases and it helps us watch over our unborn children. It has raised the life expectancy of someone with HIV over ten-fold.

Research has freed us from the fear of polio, tetanus, and the bubonic plague. Scientific research has given us more time with our loved ones and increased our overall quality of life. Biomedical research has molded our society in a myriad of ways, and has pervasively inserted itself into our daily routines such that we ordinarily fail to notice. You have a headache, you take an aspirin; you have dandruff, you use a dandruff shampoo; you take a multivitamin to stay healthy; you drink vitamin D fortified milk; you drink orange juice with folic acid; you use iodized salt. Every day biomedical research touches your life to keep you healthy, but it is most important when you or someone you love is sick. If patient care was a movie, doctors would be the actors and scientists would be the writers.

The actors deliver the lines, but the writers provide the words. Medical doctors are the frontline of patient care but there are millions of scientists 'behind-the-scenes' that provide doctors with the information they need to treat the patients. Scientists discover the treatments in the lab and work with them until they are proven safe to be used on people. This is a slow, arduous process that many people do not fully appreciate. Doctors dedicate their lives to serving patients, and scientists do the same by devoting their entire lives to the study of one disease, or just a small part of a disease. Unlike doctors who see the direct results of their treatments, researchers frequently never know if their scientific contributions even made an impact.

However, sometimes they find out they have changed the world. PCR has provided researchers with a simple means to develop or improve treatments for a variety of conditions and diseases by utilizing cloned genes, also called recombinant DNA technology. Cloned genes that are exact copies of the natural gene often generate products that are unstable or inadequate for therapeutic purposes; PCR provides a genetic engineering tool scientists can use to alter the original gene to make a better treatment or make the treatment more stable (both inside the body or for an extended shelf-life). Because of PCR technologies, hemophiliacs now have many improved treatment options with the various cloned clotting factors available to them.

PCR has aided cloning of a hormone to help infertile women, and it has helped researchers clone immune system components that are used to treat bone marrow transplant patients. Engineered vaccine components, growth factors, cancer therapies, treatments for HIV-related disorders, treatments for multiple sclerosis, and hepatitis C therapies have or are being improved through PCR-related methods. Because of PCR, many terrible conditions are more easily manageable and there is an even greater promise for what future improvements it might bring.