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If genetic diseases can be treated, will we need clones? Comment on this article, in the light of the cloning used in the novel.

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Hundreds of children with ultra-aggressive cancers have had their tumours shrunk or eradicated completely in a world-first program giving hope to every family with a child diagnosed with cancer in Australia.

The Children's Cancer Institute and the Kids Cancer Centre at Sydney Children's Hospital launched the zero childhood cancer program in 2017 to provide personalised treatments to children whose cancer had relapsed or did not respond to standard therapies.

Sean and Edwina Bradstreet say their daughter Scout is unrecognisable from the girl born with a brain tumour less than two years ago. Credit: Janie Barrett

Now, the program is open to every child diagnosed with cancer in Australia, and the first study analysing its success published in the international journal Nature Medicine on Thursday.

Of 256 children given a targeted treatment based on a molecular analysis of their cancer, 55 per cent had their tumour either disappear completely or shrink by at least half over six months. After two years, 26 per cent of children who received personalised therapies survived, more than double the rate of children on the standard treatment.

"For these children, there generally is no standard therapy available to them, so to see any response in this setting is very exciting," said Professor David Ziegler, who oversees the program's clinical trials and was one of the lead authors on the study. "More children are alive and have their disease under control using this approach. That's really groundbreaking, and something no one's really been able to show before."

One of Ziegler's patients, Scout Bradstreet, was just one month old when doctors found a tumour on the right side of her brain.

Surgeons removed the tumour and sent it off for genomic analysis, while Scout started on chemotherapy to fight the high-grade glioma. It took a massive toll on her young body.

"She was always so sick, we would be home for three days if we were lucky, and then we'd be back in hospital for two weeks," her mother Edwina said.

The genomic analysis found Scout's cancer was linked to a gene mutation known as an ALK fusion, allowing scientists to test in the lab how it would react to an ALK-inhibiting drug called alectinib.

Promising results provided a lifeline for the Bradstreets after seven months of chemotherapy failed to stop Scout's tumour from growing. When she began the treatment in November, her reaction was almost immediate.

Recent scans show the tumour has disappeared. A medicine dissolved into water and given to her in apple juice twice a day helps to keep the cancer from returning - a small sacrifice compared to endless hospital visits for intense chemotherapy.

"It's a different child who's with us now," father Sean said. "If you looked at her today, you wouldn't know there was anything going on."

Melbourne father Mohammed Haddara was initially reluctant to subject his family to genetic testing after doctors found a tumour in his daughter Daad's brain.

But after the nine-year-old's tumour returned a week and a half after she had it surgically removed, and her older sister Mounawar also fell sick, genetic testing confirmed he and wife Rima were both carriers for a gene predisposing their children to a spectrum of childhood malignancies.

The discovery helped her doctor find an immunotherapy treatment which has destroyed the tumour in Daad's brain and helped her return to life as normal.

"She's energetic [again], she likes to ride her bike, she likes to go to school ... she loves sports," Mohammed Haddara said. "Nothing's a guarantee in life, but when they gave it [the immunotherapy] to her, bang - it worked perfectly."

Rima Haddara with 10-year-old daughter Daad, whose brain tumour has shrunk to almost nothing thanks to a personalised immunotherapy. Credit: Joe Armao

All nine of Australia's children's hospitals are involved in the program, and all genetic testing is free.

Medicines are funded by a mix of charities, clinical trials, and philanthropic support from pharmaceutical companies and hospitals.

Ziegler, from the Children's Cancer Institute, said the program would continue to track children to see how they responded to the therapies long-term.

"They say saving one life is like saving a universe," he said. "That is literally how it feels to see even one child who is doing well, where previously they would have had no hope."
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When Scout was born with brain cancer, the key to fighting it was in her genes

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Hundreds of children have had their tumours shrunk or eradicated completely in a world-first program giving hope to every child diagnosed with cancer in Australia.

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What thoughts do you have about the robot in Compassion Circuit? Write them all down as a series of points (minimum 5).

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Read the site which outlines the rules in QLD for organ donation.

What is the purpose of the Organ Donation website?

How does this site aim to persuade people to donate?

What organs can be donated?

Read any two of the organ donation stories.

Do you support organ donation?

Would you donate? Give reasons.

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Do you think there will come a day when cyborgs are part of regular society? Why or why not?

What function could they serve?

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Why might people like Len Noe be considered dangerous?

Would you consider him to be a cyborg? Why or why not?

What feelings does the idea of implanting electronic devices into the body raise in you? Why?

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The Cyborg of the Future looks like you and me

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The Cyborg of the Future looks like you and me

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The cyborg of the future looks just like you

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When we think of cyborgs, what comes to mind? Ultra-futuristic beings with laser eyes and claw arms with a resemblance to Arnold Schwarzenegger. But the reality of cybernetic enhancement, or the integration of technology into our bodies to replace or enhance function, is very different.
The field of cybernetic enhancement is hundreds of years old
“We think of [cybernetic enhancement] as an ultra-futuristic technology, but… the field goes really far back,” said Dr Felix Aplin, from the Translational Neuroscience Facility at UNSW Medicine & Health. “Already from the 1800s people had this idea that maybe you could use electricity to replicate some functions.”
Alessandro Volta (1745-1827) and Luigi Galvani (1737-1798) were the first to prove that animals use electricity in their bodies, with early experiments using electricity to stimulate muscle contractions in frogs and other animals.
“What really kickstarted this field in the mid-20th century was a proper understanding of neurons and neural networks, and that they effectively are using electricity to communicate,” Dr Aplin said. Dr Felix Aplin spoke about the future of cybernetic enhancement at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, after completing the UNSW Centre for Ideas UNSOMNIA program. Photo: Maria Boyadgis. Increasing knowledge of neuroscience led to more and more people wondering, what if we connect the brain to technology? A cybernetic implant could replace lost function for someone with disability, for example the bionic ear, which already exists and has been made famous in Australia by the company Cochlear. Or it could even enhance existing function, like enabling someone to see in infrared, although this type of application is a little further off.
Enabling the brain and technology to communicate
Brains and computers both use electricity to communicate, but in fundamentally different ways. To translate between these two languages, we need neural interface engineering.
“Neural, meaning, the brain. Interface: to connect or communicate with. Engineering: building stuff. So, my field builds stuff that communicates with the brain,” Dr Aplin said.
In neural interface engineering, there are two main types of devices. ‘Sensing’ devices read the signals from your brain and convert them into computer code that can drive, for example, a robotic arm of an amputee. ‘Active’ devices take in information about the outside world, convert it into computer code, and then back into a format your brain can understand. An example of this is the bionic ear, which takes the input from a microphone and uses electrical pulses in a way that the brain can interpret as sound. Cochlear implants are the most common example of cybernetic enhancement. Photo: iStock. While progress is being made in both sensing and active devices, there’s a long way to go.
“While we understand more and more of how the brain functions, it remains one of the most complex systems in the universe. When we send electrical pulses to communicate with the brain, it’s like trying to surf the internet using morse code,” Dr Aplin said. “Finding more effective ways to talk to the brain beyond our current ‘morse code’ approach has been my career focus. There’s a lot more work to be done.”
Cybernetic implants will look like they are a part of us People also assume that cybernetic implants will be machine-like and very clearly ‘not human’ – like Luke Skywalker’s robotic hand in Star Wars, or Kano’s laser eye in Mortal Kombat. But if that were the case, we would ultimately reject these devices, both physiologically and psychologically.
“Our immune systems are terrified of anything foreign, for very good reason… Bacteria are bad news, right?” Dr Aplin said. “We need to develop better technologies that help us integrate artificially constructed components into our bodies without them being rejected.”
“In a way, you almost need to be developing mini circuits, which are made out of the same pieces, the same building blocks [as us]. Because it’s just too different to use chunks of metal with batteries.”
Watch: Building better brains - and other ways to manage our bodies Psychologically, we are also more likely to accept a device that looks like a normal part of our body. Humans have an innate fear of disrupting our sense of ‘self’ and the idea of a cybernetic implant can be confronting.
“If someone has a cyborg arm, they might be able to crush beer cans with their incredible cybernetically enhanced strength, but it’s going to look like an arm,” Dr Aplin said. “Because that’s what we’re comfortable with. We want these things to be integrated with ourselves.”
Dr Felix Aplin spoke about the future of cybernetic enhancement at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, as part of a collaboration between UNSW Sydney’s Centre for Ideas and The Ethics Centre.

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Who can donate, who can be helped by donation, how donation works, facts and myths about donation, understanding living donation, support for donor families and donation stories.

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Ethical hacker Len Noe has 10 implants in his body

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Read this short story: Compassion Circuit by John Wyndham (famous Sci-Fi author)

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Read this short story: Compassion Circuit by John Wyndham (famous Sci-Fi author)

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duplicate / cloning / replace / replicate

AI

double / twins

DNA / genetics / mitosis

identity issues

animal experiments

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3 MAIN CHARACTERS: Kathy, Tommy, Ruth

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Gattaca movie 1997.

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deserved better

very neurodivergent-coded to be honest - of course, his behaviour could just be a response to everything that happens to him

lowkey kinda wished he snapped and beat everyone up at some point...

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What happens to the clones when they finish school?

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she's a RAT