Series of interviews were written to present each PI of the CIG.
Most of them are already available on the new CIG Report’s website, and every week we will be displaying one of them in the newsletter.
“And who’s gonna fix all this?”
Life is a strange thing: a condition far out of equilibrium, apparently defying the second law of thermodynamics. Its main driving force is change, accomplished through modifying the genetic material. At the same time though, such alterations of the DNA are most often utterly detrimental to an organism. Hence the need for DNA repair mechanisms that safeguard the integrity of the hereditary material, thereby allowing a precarious balance between mutation and repair, without which evolution would not be possible. Prof. Vincent Dion and his co-workers are studying the instability of expanded trinucleotide repeats instabilities – a group of mutations that cheat the DNA repair machinery and can cause severe neurological disorders – and search for ways to correct them in patients, thereby providing a therapeutic avenue.
“The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to repair.”
Douglas Adams (1952 – 2001)