CRISPR, curing Huntington’s disease, and humanity’s future in Isaacson’s ‘Code Breaker’

In a new book about the broad issue of editing human DNA, a prominent biographer of scientific innovators proposes that such cutting-edge, potentially curative gene editing research prioritize Huntington’s disease.

 

“Our newfound ability to make edits to our genes raises some fascinating questions,” writes historian Walter Isaacson – author of studies of Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and Benjamin Franklin – at the outset of his recently published The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race.

 

Code Breaker presents a crucial account of the biggest breakthrough in genetics since the discovery of DNA’s structure in 1953 by Francis Crick and James Watson.

 

Editing our DNA, the molecule that makes up our genes and guides our biological lives, to make us less susceptible to microbes like the coronavirus would be a “wonderful boon,” Isaacson suggests in the introduction.

 

“Should we use gene editing to eliminate dreaded disorders, such as Huntington’s, sickle-cell anemia, and cystic fibrosis?” he asks. “That sounds good, too.”

 

Jennifer Doudna, Ph.D., the subject of Code Breaker, has also embraced the concept of gene editing for HD if it can become a safe and effective therapy. Dr. Doudna won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work in identifying and understanding the natural gene editing process now widely known as CRISPR, and the insight that this tool could potentially be refined for use not only in the laboratory, but ultimately also in the clinic, to alter human DNA.

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Above, author Walter Isaacson learns CRISPR editing, and, below, the cover of Code Breaker (images from Simon & Schuster website).

 

A historic breakthrough, major consequences

 

In Code Breaker, Isaacson traces the influence of the controversial Watson, now 93, on Dr. Doudna and others. He also interviewed Watson.

 

For both general readers and specialists, Code Breaker furnishes an excellent description of Dr. Doudna and others’ investigation of the structure and actions of CRISPR-Cas9, the specific type of gene editing feasible for use in humans.

 

CRISPR stands for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats,” a strand of RNA, and Cas-9 for the enzyme associated with the RNA. Cas-9 acts as a type of scissors to cut DNA. The RNA guides the enzyme to the cutting target. There are other types of CRISPR.

 

Ultimately, Isaacson delves into the significance of CRISPR (and related themes such as biohacking and home genetic testing) for the future of humanity. CRISPR can perhaps end single-gene disorders like Huntington’s – but might ultimately also permit us to change such characteristics as IQ, muscle size and strength, and height. Russian President Vladimir Putin has extolled CRISPR as a potential way to produce “super-soldiers,” as Isaacson notes.

 

A powerful bioethical story

 

Isaacson has produced a powerful bioethical study of when and how gene editing should be done. He interviewed Dr. Doudna other scientists on their views. He also consulted bioethicists and their writings.

 

He also contrasts competing political theories regarding editing, pitting the idea of a free-market “genetic supermarket,” where the individual decides, against that of a society (and its government) that would permit editing only if it did not increase inequality.

 

Thus, Code Breaker is a major contribution to bioethics (the ethics of medical and biological research). Isaacson analyzes the potential social, moral, ethical, political, and ultimately biological consequences of gene editing and the conflicts it might produce. Editing the human race could produce many wonders, but also less biological diversity and greater and more permanent inequality, as the rich will almost inevitably gain privileged access to therapies and enhancements.

 

Isaacson illuminates this dilemma by recounting Dr. Doudna’s own “ethical journey” on gene editing.

 

“By limiting gene edits to those that are truly ‘medically necessary,’ she says, we can make it less likely that parents could seek to ‘enhance’ their children, which she feels is morally and socially wrong,” he writes. The lines between the different types of edits can be blurry.

 

“As long as we are correcting genetic mutations by restoring the ‘normal’ version of the gene – not inventing some wholly new enhancement not seen in the average human genome ­ – we’re likely to be on the safe side,” Dr. Doudna affirms.

 

Code Breaker also offers important evidence of the tension between so-called open science, where researchers (and some biohackers) freely share data, and the scientists, universities, and corporations that fight to establish patents and earn profits. (Click here for more on this development.)

 

Making the case for editing the HD mutation

 

Isaacson recounts how, in 2016, Dr. Doudna was especially moved by a visit at her workplace, the University of California, Berkeley, with a man from an HD family, who described to her how his father and grandfather had died of the disease, and that his three sisters, also diagnosed with the disorder, now “faced a slow, agonizing death.”

 

Putting Huntington’s first in a series of bioethical case studies, Isaacson underscores the crucial need for an HD CRISPR treatment, noting the disease’s devastating symptoms and rare, dominant genetic nature (inheriting the mutation from just one parent is sufficient for getting symptoms).

 

“If ever there was a case for editing a human gene, it would be for getting rid of the mutation that produces the cruel and painful killer known as Huntington’s disease,” Isaacson asserts.

 

Eliminating HD forever

 

For HD, Isaacson suggests a germline edit—removing the elongated piece of DNA in the huntingtin gene that causes HD in an embryo. A treatment done at this stage would restore the normal function of the HD gene in all the body cells, including that individual’s eggs or sperm. This genetic repair would then be inheritable, thus erasing HD forever from the future generations of the family.

 

Scientific protocol and governments have not yet approved such edits, though they have been done in animal subjects. As narrated in great detail in Code Breaker, a Chinese researcher did such an edit – to prevent AIDS – in twin babies in 2018, only to be punished by his country’s government and criticized as irresponsible by scientific colleagues. However, Dr. Doudna and other pioneers of CRISPR remain hopeful that safe, inheritable edits will become acceptable for at least some conditions.

 

Isaacson mentions two alternatives to germline editing that can eliminate HD from a family’s lineage. First, adoption. Second, preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), which involves in vitro fertilization using embryos screened for the mutation. PGD has been used in the HD community for about 20 years. Before PGD arrived, some families, like mine, have had our offspring tested in the womb. However, neither of these strategies have been used widely in the HD community by at-risk couples.

 

If it can be harnessed safely, to target only the abnormal HD gene, and delivered effectively to human cells, CRISPR could provide the all-out cure for Huntington’s long sought by science and so deeply hoped for by HD families.

 

Isaacson concludes, “it seems (at least to me) that Huntington’s is a genetic malady that we should eliminate from the human race.”

 

For now, don’t ‘hold your breath’ for an HD CRISPR therapy

 

Isaacson states that “fixing Huntington’s is not a complex edit,” but he does not elaborate further.

 

However, while leading HD scientists are eagerly using CRISPR as a research tool, the technique is far from ready as a therapy.

 

CRISPR was a key topic at the “Ask the Scientist … Anything” panel of the virtual 36th Annual Convention of the Huntington’s Disease Society ofAmerica (HDSA), held June 10-13. Noting that many in the HD community have inquired about CRISPR, HDSA Chief Scientific Officer George Yohrling, Ph.D., asked the panel to comment on its potential as a therapy.

 

“CRISPR is really an exciting tool,” said researcher Jeff Carroll, Ph.D., co-founder of the HDBuzz website and, like me, an HD gene carrier who lost his mother to the disease. “CRISPR allows us really for the first time to edit DNA itself in a very precise way, to make very precise cuts in the DNA of a cell or even in an intact organism.” He added: “scientists are using it like crazy” in lab experiments.

 

In his own HD-focused lab at Western Washington University, Dr. Carroll and his team have developed a line of experimental mice with cells containing enzymes (proteins that act as chemical catalysts) necessary for doing CRISPR edits, Dr. Carroll explained. Such enzymes do not normally occur in human cells, he added.

 

Using CRISPR, “we can mess with these mice’s genome [DNA] in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago,” Dr. Carroll continued.

 

Dr. Jeff Carroll commenting on HD science at the virtual 2021 HDSA national convention (screenshot by Gene Veritas, aka Kenneth P. Serbin)

 

For an HD family, “the idea of cutting out the DNA and fixing it is very, very appealing and something we can do in animal models and [animal and human] cell lines in the lab already, and it looks really promising.”

 

However, Dr. Carroll offered a blunt assessment of the current state of research on CRISPR as an HD treatment.

 

“As an actual HD therapy, I’m less excited about CRISPR,” he said. “I think it’s many years away. Something based on it may someday help us, but you have to realize that these enzymes that you need to enact CRISPR are themselves giant proteins that actually originate from bacteria, and we have to put them into the cell.

 

“So, if you want to use CRISPR as a therapy for Huntington’s and we want to modify all the DNA in the whole brain, we have to get into every one of your 84 billion neurons and put a CRISPR factor in there and modify the DNA.”

 

As a result, “Huntington’s will not be the first disease treated with CRISPR,” Dr. Carroll concluded. “I wouldn’t hold your breath for it as a therapy for HD in the medium or short term.”

 

Currently, a possible better candidate for a CRISPR treatment would be a disease involving immune cells that could be removed from the body, edited, and then reintroduced into the individual, Dr. Carroll observed.

 

Elaborating on Dr. Carroll’s comments, Ed Wild, M.D., Ph.D., another speaker at the HDSA science panel and also a co-founder of HDBuzz, cited the example of a blood cancer as a possible early target for CRISPR.

 

He agreed with Dr. Carroll that an HD CRISPR treatment remains difficult at this time and underscored why: unlike parts of the body like blood cells or bone marrow, brain cells cannot be removed, treated, and reinserted or given replacements.

 

Further cautions

 

An August 2020 HDBuzz article also urged caution in the use of CRISPR for HD and other genetic diseases in the wake of three experiments with human embryos that resulted in “unintended changes in the genome.” These so-called “off-target” effects suggest that “CRISPR is less precise than previously thought,” the article stated. Like desired edits, the unwanted ones make permanent changes to the DNA.

 

Such unintended edits are “bad because our DNA code is a very precise set of instructions, which can be thought of like a cooking recipe,” the article explained. “If you rearranged the steps in a recipe or got rid of some of the ingredients the outcome would not be good!”

 

When CRISPR is used in an embryo, the mistaken edits would not only affect that individual, but could also be passed on to the next generation.

 

Clarifying some key points

 

As an HD advocate and family member who has tracked the research for two decades, I felt that Code Breaker could have gone into greater depth about HD science. Given all the valuable detail about Dr. Doudna’s and other scientists’ efforts to discover the workings of CRISPR, it would have been helpful to present some scenarios about how it might work in HD.

 

Code Breaker also states that in HD the “wild sequence of excess DNA serves no good purpose.” This is a confusing term, as so-called “wild” type DNA in this context usually means “normal” DNA. Isaacson might better have done better to avoid the use of this term, but instead to emphasize that the normal huntingtin gene is essential for life and brain cell stability, as HD research has demonstrated. Normal huntingtin is present in all humans without the mutation and even in those who have inherited a mutation from one parent, because the non-HD parent has passed on a normal copy of the gene.

 

The book could have further benefited from additional references to both the scientific and social significance of the disease as presented in works such as Dr. Thomas Bird’s Can You Help Me? Inside the Turbulent World of Huntington Disease. There was also no reference to the pathbreaking research on modifier genes, which can hasten or delay the onset of HD.

 

Contemplating the ‘gift’ of life

 

Citing the philosopher Michael Sandel, Isaacson points out that finding “ways to rig the natural lottery” of genetics could lead humanity to humbly appreciate the “gifted character of human powers and achievements. […] Our talents and powers are not wholly our own doing.”

 

Still, I agree with Isaacson that “few of us would regard Alzheimer’s or Huntington’s to be a result of giftedness.”

 

Even so, it’s important to recall that HD researchers continue to investigate the role of the huntingtin gene not only in the disease, but, in the words of one study, in intelligence and the “evolution of a superior human brain.”

 

Faced with the daunting challenges of the disease, many HD mutation carriers and affected individuals have also grown in unexpected ways. I, for one, consider myself a lucky man because of the richer life I have lived as a result of my family’s fight against Huntington’s.

 

In this new reality, advocating once again for our families

 

HD families like mine have lived on the frontier of bioethics, facing challenges such as genetic testing, prenatal testing, genetic discrimination, decisions on family planning, and many others.

 

Perhaps, as Code Breaker speculates, gene editing may someday be considered morally acceptable in the way that in vitro fertilization and PGD have come to be.

 

However, as seen in the case of abortion, the HD community does not have a monolithic bioethical stance (click here and here to read more).

 

It remains an open question as to whether the HD community would wholeheartedly embrace CRISPR as a therapy. Some might celebrate it as a cure, but others might see it as going against nature or even as a return to the era of eugenics in the early- to mid-20th century, when medical professionals advocated sterilization for HD-affected individuals. Taking a cue from the United States, the Nazis were said to have forcibly sterilized as many as 3,500 people affected by Huntington’s.

 

No book can offer a definitive answer to these ethical quandaries. Code Breaker provides us with at least some basic guideposts.

 

It will ultimately fall to HD-affected individuals and their families (and those families affected by other diseases) to navigate what could very soon become the new reality of gene editing – and, when necessary, to act as powerful advocates. To assist us in this journey, we will need ethically informed health professionals and patient organizations.

‘Inequality is unsustainable’: a view of the quest for Huntington’s disease treatments from the Global South

(I dedicate this article to the worldwide HD community as we mark Huntington’s Disease Awareness Month in many countries around the planet.)

 

Both the COVID-19 pandemic and the quest for treatments for rare and genetic diseases have laid bare deep social divisions across the world, and it behooves the scientific establishment to help resolve this ethical dilemma, says a leading Brazilian Huntington’s disease clinician.

 

“The world should not be divided between those who have money and those who don’t,” Mônica Santoro Haddad, M.D., a neurologist with 33 years’ practice at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) School of Medicine, told me in an April 30 Zoom interview about the 16th Annual HD Therapeutics Conference. “The pandemic has already shown us that. This inequality is unsustainable.”

 

Dr. Haddad has assisted HD patients from 600 families at the USP neurology clinic and her private office. A participant in the 2013 Therapeutics Conference in Venice, Italy, and 2014 meeting in Palm Springs, CA, she watched all of this year’s three-day virtual event (April 27-29) online. The conferences are sponsored by CHDI Foundation, Inc.

 

“What we’re witnessing in Brazil [regarding the pandemic] is immoral – Brazil in relationship to the world and Brazil in general,” Dr. Haddad observed, speaking in her native Portuguese. “Two categories of people have been created: those with the vaccine, those without the vaccine.”

 

A South American giant struggles

 

Sadly, Brazil ranks second in the world behind the United States with more than 428,000 COVID-19 deaths.

 

As a history professor, I have dedicated much of my career to the study of Brazil, a country that I consider my second  home; my wife is Brazilian, and her extended family is there. Along the way, I have witnessed the development of the Associação Brasil Huntington and built ties to its leaders.

 

A major country of the Global South – the world’s developing countries – Brazil has an estimated 20,000-plus afflicted individuals and an active HD movement. An enthusiastic group of some 30 Brazilians took part in #HDdennomore, Pope Francis’ special audience with the HD in May 2017. Francis, a native of Argentina, is also the first pontiff from the Global South.

 

However, although Brazil’s medical system has gained international recognition for past vaccine campaigns and its model fight against AIDS, during the pandemic the country has lacked hospital beds, cemetery plots, and basic supplies. Like Donald Trump, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro denied the crisis, downplayed the dangers, and actively denounced such measures as mask-wearing.

 

In addition, Brazil has fallen victim to the international inequities in the rollout of vaccines. Both U.S. President Joe Biden and former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – a likely candidate in the 2022 presidential election – have backed waiving COVID-19 vaccine patents to assure global access.

 

Brazil’s deep internal disparities have led to inadequate vaccine distribution to the poor and marginalized.

 

Recognizing similar, longstanding neglect in other South American countries, the humanitarian organization Factor-H has continued to assist abandoned HD families during the crisis.

 

Providing everybody access to medicines

 

Echoing her concerns about COVID-19, Dr. Haddad affirmed the need for a “change in the paradigm” regarding rare and genetic diseases like Huntington’s.

 

As in the U.S. and elsewhere, fear and denial frequently underlie Brazilians’ decisions to avoid genetic testing and facing the terrible medical and social challenges posed by the disease. Many Brazilians have “prejudice against disease” in general, Dr. Haddad told me in a 2013 interview.

 

However, the trend against testing might be shifting for the younger generations, and could also change among older groups when the overall outlook for treatments has improved, Dr. Haddad wrote in a May 14 WhatsApp message. Clinical trials seeking presymptomatic HD gene carriers will require testing, she added.

 

Like medical professionals in many countries, Dr. Haddad believes genetic testing is a personal decision, with the procedure governed by established protocol and with professional medical and psychological support.

 

As of April 2021, the Brazilian government has required all private health plans and insurance to cover genetic testing. This represented a “small advance,” Dr. Haddad asserted in our Zoom interview, because health advocates want to see the country’s free public health service also provide that benefit.

 

For Dr. Haddad, for HD to be defeated, inequality must diminish.

 

“The question is: is it ethical to diagnose someone with one of those diseases and not have a treatment available?” Dr. Haddad said. “This is a question that I discuss with my patients and with my colleagues.”

 

She added: “It is certainly not ethical to have a treatment that not everybody has access to.”

 

The HD Therapeutics Conference left her with her “hope battery recharged” and confident that a treatment is possible, Dr. Haddad said.

 

 

Gene Veritas interviewing Dr. Mônica Haddad (screenshot by Gene Veritas, aka Kenneth P. Serbin)

 

Advocating for open science

 

At the close of the conference, Dr. Haddad was inspired by the presentation by featured speaker Aled Edwards, Ph.D., who in 2004 founded the Structural Genomix Consortium (SGC), which practices and advocates for open sharing of scientific information, particularly as it applies to protein science, chemical biology, and drug discovery.

 

Dr. Edwards, the SGC CEO and a scientist based at the University of Toronto, spoke on “HD drug discovery in the public domain – a model for CHDI.” A breath of “fresh air,” Dr. Edwards’ talk pointed the way to reducing inequality, Dr. Haddad told me.

 

“What we would also like to do is develop a drug discovery ecosystem that prioritizes affordability and global access, and, of course, to do this in collaboration with industry,” Dr. Edwards stated. “Now this might sound naïve, but I’d like to emphasize there’s quite a bit of drug discovery experience in the SGC and in our network.”

 

Dr. Edwards presented examples of researchers who have followed the open science model – including 16 “HD open science programs” that share science “as they go,” with some even blogging about their findings. He highlighted the work of Rachel Harding, Ph.D., an SGC researcher and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto who achieved the “very challenging” task of purifying the huntingtin protein to a “resolution that is practically useful” to other scientists.

 

Dr. Harding has widely shared both the protein and reagents (compounds that facilitate chemical reactions) that enable the making of the protein, ultimately aiming to inform the discovery of potential HD drugs, in particular so-called small-molecule drugs, Dr. Edwards explained.

 

Discussed at the Therapeutics Conference, these drugs become distributed very evenly across the whole body, including the brain, whereas several drugs in other current or recently completed clinical trials need to be injected directly into the brain or via spinal tap.

 

“This is a really fantastic contribution to the public good that these folks have made,” Dr. Edwards said of Dr. Harding’s team.

 

Sharing science as they go: Huntington's disease "open science champs" as presented by Dr. Aled Edwards, at upper right (screenshot by Gene Veritas)

 

Seeking more efficient drug discovery

 

Dr. Edwards underscored a key point: despite spending $300 billion globally each year on research and development and producing many hugely successful drugs, the biomedical field is highly inefficient. “We need to do better as a society,” he asserted.

 

“For many diseases – Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s – we don’t even know the molecular mechanism of the disease, let alone how to design a therapeutic strategy,” Dr. Edwards said, adding that a system in which the “first past the post gets the money” in designing drugs has required “the pricing of medicines at levels that are unaffordable for most people on the planet.”

 

Dr. Edwards displayed data demonstrating how globally most research focuses on the familiar rather than explore new, potentially crucial areas of biology. Similarly, in industry, companies pursue drugs in parallel rather than collaborate, wasting valuable resources, he added.

 

SGC is working against the grain, trying to create the way for a new scientific culture. The SGC never files for patents “as a core principle,” Dr. Edwards explained. “All of the work we do goes into the public domain, including the reagents that we make.”

 

If labs and companies openly shared data before doing the final crucial test on a potential drug in a Phase 3 trial, the field could not only save money, but test multiple drugs at the same time, he said.

 

Rather than rely on patents, the system should take advantage of federal laws that give companies protection from competition for a fixed period, generally five to twelve years, Dr. Edwards affirmed. The law provides even longer periods for orphan and pediatric drugs.

 

Supporting the public good

 

“There is no law of physics that says industry has to invent a drug,” Dr. Edwards said. “That’s the social system that we’ve put in place. Let’s imagine a different system.”

 

To “walk the walk about open drug discovery,” SGC established the Agora Open Science Trust, a registered charity in Canada modeled on Newman’s Own Foundation, which funnels profits from food products with the picture of the late Academy-Award-Winning actor into philanthropy.

 

Dr. Edwards described its goal: “To support open science and the public good, and price new medicines to ensure global access. Whether you’re a rich American or live in Thailand, you’re going to get the medicine at a price you can afford.”

 

In its first project, Agora has focused on children’s cancers. As of yet the trust has not announced a plan for an HD drug program, although Dr. Edwards and the above-mentioned HD open science researchers have an abiding interest in finding treatments.

 

Indeed, regarding those treatments, Dr. Edwards concluded that “if we do it as a collective, we’ll get further faster.”

 

 

Dr. Aled Edwards explains the creation of for-profit drug companies to fund the Agora Open Science Trust, whose mission is to ensure global, affordable access to new medicines (screenshot by Gene Veritas).

 

Knowledge belongs to the world

 

If Dr. Edwards and SGC achieve their goals, they will have a place in history, Dr. Haddad observed. The emphasis on sharing data will “democratize” knowledge, she added.

 

“It’s obvious that a company does things to earn money,” Dr. Haddad continued. She noted, however, that Dr. Edwards is asking scientists and others to put their vanity aside to help the suffering.

 

Brazil has not yet hosted, and may not host in the future, any sites for the major HD clinical trials, Dr. Haddad pointed out. She noted that the local HD community attempted to bring to Brazil the historic Phase 3 gene silencing clinical trial by Roche, which reported the unfavorable results at the HD Therapeutics Conference. In South America, Roche ran the trial in Argentina and Chile.

 

“We did the paperwork to try to include a Brazilian research center, and because of questions raised by an ethics committee and political and legal issues, we were unsuccessful,” Dr. Haddad explained. “Brazil did not permit genetic material [from the clinical trial] to be sent out of the country.”

 

For now, Dr. Haddad said, Brazilians can at least look forward to the possibility of their government’s authorization of the drug Austedo, approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2017 for chorea, the involuntary movements that occur in many HD-affected individuals.

 

At this time, Brazil’s lack of participation in clinical trials of drugs that aim to slow or stop the disease is “not important,” Dr. Haddad concluded. Echoing Dr. Edwards – and the hope of thousands of Brazilian HD families anxiously awaiting the arrival of effective treatments but fearful that the country might not be able to afford them – she added: “The knowledge obtained belongs to the world.”

A veteran neurologist’s book offers tools for navigating the ‘turbulent world’ of Huntington’s disease

 

In the fight against any disease, affected individuals and health professionals can arm themselves with an invaluable tool: detailed, cutting-edge knowledge about a condition’s medical and social impact.

 

For the Huntington’s disease community and related disorders, Thomas Bird, M.D., has made a key contribution with his book Can You Help Me? Inside the Turbulent World of Huntington Disease, published last year (Oxford University Press).

 

A retired neurologist who has observed more than 1,000 individuals with HD, Dr. Bird has produced one of the most important – and most accessible – introductions to this devastating disorder. Can You Help Me? will remain relevant for years.

 

Dr. Bird is an Emeritus Professor of Neurology and Medical Genetics at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA. His career spanned more than 40 years, including pioneering work in the field of clinical neurogenetics (diagnosing and evaluating hereditary nervous system disorders). His patients included sufferers of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Parkinson’s disease (PD), and other severe, chronic brain conditions.

 

“I have been […] constantly amazed, puzzled, distressed and impressed by the trials and tribulations of these families coping with it,” Dr. Bird writes of Huntington’s. (As with some in neighboring Canada and elsewhere, he calls it “Huntington disease.”) “Dealing with HD has been so moving, so unsettling and so challenging for me that I felt compelled to write about it.”

 

“Can you help me?” a desperate HD-affected man wrote Dr. Bird from the state penitentiary in 1980 seeking medical assistance. That question reverberated in Dr. Bird’s encounters with many other HD people and their families and caregivers.

 

With non-technical, limpid prose, Dr. Bird tells the full story of HD’s wide-ranging medical, socioeconomic, and legal implications through a series of poignant vignettes, based on hundreds of HD cases. He changed identifying information to preserve patient privacy, and in some cases created composites of two or three different individuals.

 

Can You Help Me? will ring familiar to veterans of the HD cause, but it also offers new revelations and insights about HD’s impact. Also, it provides an excellent primer for families new to HD.

 

 

Key lessons about bioethical challenges

 

Many of the stories in Can You Help Me? center on the bioethical challenges faced by HD families, such as the complex ramifications of genetic testing.

 

Dr. Bird retells the story of a deeply troubled young man from an HD family killed by the police after a life of drug use and many clashes with the law – anti-social behavior perhaps resulting from the disease. The man’s aunt pleaded with Dr. Bird to have the coroner confirm the man’s HD status, because he had a three-year-old daughter for whom the test result would someday hold great relevance. Divorced, the man had lost contact with the mother.

 

“Needless to say, this was uncharted territory for us,” Dr. Bird writes of his clinical team. “The appropriate legal or ethical aspects of this case were not clear to me, but I called the University Hospital genetics lab and explained the situation.” On Dr. Bird’s orders, the lab performed the test.

 

The test demonstrated that the man indeed did have HD – “another burden” for the extended family, as Dr. Bird writes.

 

“To this day, I do not know if we followed the correct strategy in trying to help this family,” he concludes. It seemed like “quick thinking” to ask the coroner to save a sample of the dead man’s blood for HD testing, he observes. But many questions remained, including when and how to tell the girl of her at-risk status, he adds.

 

Dr. Bird believed that he might encounter the family again, when the little girl had grown up.

 

Dr. Thomas Bird (book jacket photo by Chang En Yu)

 

No ‘typical’ patient

 

In an appendix, Dr. Bird provides an overview of the genetics of HD and the genetic testing process. In general, as I noted in a previous article, Dr. Bird’s book has helped move the HD field from a traditional, more limited kind of genetic counseling to broader “genetic education.”

 

Can You Help Me? reflects on many other key issues for the HD community.

 

He offers valuable insight into the challenges faced by health professionals working with HD patients, as exemplified in the story of a patient clinic who shot himself. “Could we have done more?” Dr. Bird asks. “These situations are heavy burdens for everyone to bear.”

 

Dr. Bird’s vignettes underscore another crucial point in line with the latest medical and scientific research into the disease: there is no “typical” HD patient, as symptoms manifest uniquely in each case.

 

Notably, Dr. Bird does not describe HD as being like a combination of other diseases such as AD and PD, a shorthand some in the HD community use. Dr. Bird instead compares HD to these and other conditions, thus adding vital context.

 

Dr. Bird also emphasizes the need to end the false dichotomy between psychiatric “mental” diseases like schizophrenia and “brain” diseases like HD. Both originate in the brain, he points out, and both cause “mental illness.” Psychiatry and neurology should intersect more, he argues.

 

A contribution to the history of HD

 

In researching the book, Dr. Bird did important historical legwork. For instance, he painstakingly tracked down important episodes such as the use of lobotomies as an attempt to treat HD.

 

“It is estimated that 50,000 lobotomies were performed in this country between 1938 and 1955,” Dr. Bird writes. “Since persons with HD were often institutionalized and lobotomies were common, it is likely that many of these operations were performed on patients with HD.”

 

Although the procedures on HD people were “not easy to document,” Dr. Bird finally found evidence by examining medical texts. In all, Dr. Bird estimates that “perhaps more than 100” people with HD had the operation. It is not currently recommended for HD.

 

A ‘Princess in Pink’

 

Although many vignettes are gut-wrenching, Can You Help Me? also highlights the sometimes-brighter side of the HD story, such as individuals with late onset, mild symptoms, and productive lives.

 

That message holds two-fold meaning for me as an asymptomatic 61-year-old HD gene carrier who saw his mother develop the disease in her late 40s and die at 68.

 

First, I remember how fortunate I am to have reached this stage without symptoms.

 

Secondly, as a writer and advocate, it reminds me that, no matter how badly the disease has turned people like my mother into shadows of themselves, we should see them as humans struggling with disabling symptoms.

 

A caring community can seek to alleviate some of that burden.

 

One of my favorite stories from Can You Help Me? spotlights the “Princess in Pink,” Bobbi, a little girl who, although afflicted with juvenile HD, maintained her cheerfulness.

 

Bobbi’s fifth-grade teacher, Miss Perry, “decided to be proactive,” Dr. Bird writes. “She wanted to make Bobbi more comfortable in the classroom and educate her other students about Bobbi’s disease and how to relate to persons with disabilities.”

 

The class created the “Princess Project” to discuss HD and create a booklet ­– with a pink cover and a picture of Bobbi wearing a pink crown – about Bobbi and her condition. The classmates wrote perceptive and compassionate entries and also made drawings of Bobbi.

 

“It was a learning experience for everyone, including the adults,” Dr. Bird recalls.

 

Sadly, by age 15, Bobbi’s conditioned worsened, requiring a feeding tube, a frequent end-of-life measure for HD patients. She died in a hospice setting. Several of her old classmates attended the memorial service, where they fondly remembered Bobbi, Dr. Bird writes.

 

A resounding ‘yes’ in wanting to help

 

Can You Help Me? is one of the best and most important books about HD. It builds on the work of historian Alice Wexler, in particular her book The Woman Who Walked into the Sea, which uncovers many of the prejudices associated with HD (click here to read my review).

 

Dr. Bird has provided us with a deeply rich documentation of life in the HD trenches.

 

The title Can You Help Me? asks a question that I and so many other HD family members have posed when confronted with the frightening prospects of HD. (It also holds great value for people in the AD, PD, and other neurological disease communities.)

 

“Sometimes we can help a great deal, sometimes we can only help a little, and sometimes we just muddle through as best we can, navigating our way between suffering and harm,” Dr. Bird concludes, noting briefly that research towards treatments “heralds better days ahead for the world of HD.”

 

Fortunately, for the HD community, Dr. Bird’s book indicates a resounding “yes” regarding the desire by him and so many other professionals to alleviate the suffering caused by HD.

 

(For an interview of Dr. Bird about the book, click here).

A friend of the Huntington’s community receives award for HD article in influential Brazilian magazine

Brazilian journalist Mônica Manir, holder of a doctorate in bioethics and a long-time friend of the Huntington’s disease community, received the Prêmio Synapsis (Synapsis Prize) for her in-depth December 2017 article on the disorder in the prestigious Brazilian magazine Piauí.

Titled “Dançando no escuro” (“Dancing in the Dark”), the article provides a detailed portrait of HD, focusing on families in Brazil and other countries affected by the condition, which causes involuntary movements, cognitive decline, and psychiatric problems. Piauí is on the level of The New Yorker magazine.

The Prêmio Synapsis is sponsored by the Brazilian Federation of Hospitals and awarded annually for the best journalistic reports on health issues in the categories of print publications, TV, online, and radio.

For her article, Manir did almost five months of reporting, traveling to the interior to visit a town with a large nucleus of affected families and also to the Vatican in May 2017 to witness Pope Francis’ special audience with the global HD community.

Upon receiving the Prêmio Synapsis in Brasília on November 27, Manir recalled the pope’s declaration that HD should be “hidden no more!”

Mônica Manir receiving the Prêmio Synapsis (photo by Federação Brasileira de Hospitais)

Manir received her degree in journalism at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), one of Brazil’s leading universities, in 1990. She worked as both a reporter and editor for the Sunday news and cultural section of the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo.

In 2013, she reported for the paper on the sixth World Congress on Huntington’s Disease, held in Rio de Janeiro. She also set up a talk by me on HD and bioethics in São Paulo at the Centro Universitário São Camilo’s graduate program in bioethics, where she received both her Master’s and Ph.D.

She is also doing a post-doctoral study at the USP’s Instituto Oscar Freire on the dilemmas of predictive testing for people at risk for HD.

On December 5, Manir granted the following interview via e-mail.

GV: What led you to study journalism?

MM: I was always a very curious person. I wanted to understand the “why” of everything. I always pestered my parents with questions. I also loved reading. When I was 14, my sister started studying literature at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas [in São Paulo state] and became a member of the Círculo do Livro [a bi-weekly book club]. I couldn’t wait to “inherit” from her all of those books that arrived at our house. I also loved writing and was praised for my school reports. In middle school, I discovered that the history taught in the schools had a political bias. I felt the wool had been pulled over our eyes with all of the language that permeated the school texts and that often hid the facts. I decided that, by becoming a journalist, I could try to get as close as I could to the truth to help people become more critical and aware. I wanted to be where things were happening and consider all the angles. To do that, I needed to do deeper reporting. That’s why I always preferred working for media that allowed me to do in-depth reporting.

GV: What inspired you to write an article for Piauí about Huntington’s?

MM: Although I already knew about the disease because of the article I did for O Estado de S. Paulo in 2013, I was inspired to do the piece for Piauí by the audience with the pope at the Vatican. I thought it was a theme appropriate for returning to the subject, now in a more profound way, because I would come into contact with the affected, the families, and the health professionals from different parts of the world.

GV: What did it mean for you to receive the Prêmio Synapsis for your article “Dancing in the Dark”? Why is the prize called “Synapsis”?

MM: It meant for me a big investment in an in-depth article. Just to report it took almost five months, including my trip to the Vatican and to Ervália, a small town with a large enclave of people with the disease in the state of Minas Gerais, and also the reading of articles and books, and long interviews with the affected, family members, specialists, artists. Then came the writing up of all that enormous amount of information, the organization of the text, and the fact-checking, and then the final version, which took up seven pages in the magazine. According to the sponsors, the name of the prize is intended to recognize the brilliant ideas regarding the improvement of Brazil’s health system. The term “synapsis” has to do with “link,” “connection.”

GV: What did you say as you accepted the prize?

MM: I thanked the sponsors for their initiative in stimulating discussion about the Brazilian health system, which is essential in a country with such social inequality in all areas. I also thanked Piauí magazine for having invested in a theme still little known, and for having sent me to the Vatican and Ervália to cover different angles of the subject. But I especially thanked the HD-affected, their relatives, and the health professionals, all of whom deal with prejudice, the difficulties of being diagnosed, and the hitches that have occurred in the search for treatments, all of this unfortunately also very common in other rare diseases. Lastly, I remembered the theme of the audience with Pope Francis: “Hidden no more!”

GV: After the ceremony at which you received your trophy, many people greeted you and said that they had not heard of HD but would now take an interest in it. What explains this reaction?

MM: I think the fact that a prestigious magazine like Piauí took interest in the subject is already a reason for reading the article. Another point is that this disease can be present in a family or friends without anybody knowing about it. Or, even if people know about it, they might lack detailed information. So, there’s curiosity about learning more about HD. One couple present at the ceremony said that they knew about the disease because a relative had symptoms. They called it “Huntington’s chorea,” as it is still sometimes known in Brazil, and praised the fact that the magazine had addressed the subject.

GV: It’s been a year since the publication of “Dancing in the Darkness.” Beyond your prize, what has been the article’s impact in Brazil?

MM: When it was published, it drew praise from various quarters, from apartment doormen to Brazilian celebrities, besides the subjects themselves.

GV: What was it like to cover the affected families in Rome in May 2017?

MM: It was a very rich experience! I understood much better the anguish of the families, the factors that accentuated or eased that anguish, and the determination to diminish the silence on the matter. Everybody was very kind to me, answering patiently my endless questions!

GV: What led you to study bioethics?

MM: I think bioethics combines perfectly with journalism in the sense that the guiding concept is “it depends.” Central questions of human existence can’t be viewed just from one angle. It’s necessary to turn the prism and observe the effects that has on the light. It’s necessary to understand the context of a matter, people’s wishes, the internal and external pressures, and, from that point, try to register things with sensitivity. Bioethics showed – and continues to show – me the profound dilemmas of life and death that are still far from being answered with a single response. 

GV: What has most impacted you regarding Huntington’s?

MM: Huntington’s is a hereditary disease that leaves families on hold. Questions hang over them: “Do I carry the gene? Does my child? And my mother? And my nephew?” Despite the existence of a predictive test, very few undergo testing to learn their status before the actual onset of symptoms – which is completely understandable, because there is still no cure. At the same time, there are cutting-edge research projects that could block the genetic trigger and, as a result, help to treat and/or cure this and other diseases.

GV: What message would you like to transmit to the Huntington’s community in Brazil? And beyond?

MM: I would like to say that I understand very well all of the suffering encompassing the disease and how, sometimes, people feel like hiding it in the closet. But I think the prize confirms the main point of the papal audience: we must speak about Huntington’s. Shedding light on things hurts. However, it helps to make people aware of alternatives and of the partners to be found on this journey. The disease does not affect my family, but my empathy – and that of so many other individuals – is not a question of blood, but of soul. I’m with you!