This is the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture where you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music (including of course Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen), film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of…
Culture
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How a Young Woman Copes With a Rare Genetic Disorder
‘My gums are peeling,” said a 22-year-old Elli Resnick to her mother as she removed a piece of salmon-colored flesh from her mouth. Other clues had been tipping off Resnick that she might be ill: She suffered from frequent bloody noses, always had a “potato chip feeling” in her mouth and, because she couldn’t eat…
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San Francisco To Get a Genetics Center
Four years ago, Michael Rancer, an administrator at the University of California, Berkeley, lost his son to familial dysautonomia, a rare genetic disorder found among Ashkenazic Jews that causes the nervous system to deteriorate. Today, Rancer is one of the prime movers behind a proposed new center for Jewish genetic diseases in San Francisco that…
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NEWS AND ADVANCES IN BRIEF
When clinical trials began two years ago for treatment of Late Onset Tay-Sachs with the drug Zavesca, the trial was scheduled to last one year, with a possible 12-month extension. But because LOTS is such a rare disease, with only 200 known cases nationwide, researchers at New York University’s School of Medicine and the University…
The Latest
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Drug May Prolong Lives of Tay-Sachs Babies
For the first time ever, infants with Tay-Sachs disease may have a fighting chance at prolonging their lives. In July, the pharmaceutical company Actelion approved a contract for clinical trials of the drug Zavesca for treatment of infants with Tay-Sachs disease. The proposal marks the first clinical trial ever to involve infants suffering from the…
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NYU Move To Offer 16 Tests Ups the Ante for Screening
In September, New York University Medical Center will become the first medical facility in the country to offer Ashkenazic Jewish couples tests for 16 inheritable genetic diseases, an expansion from the nine tests it offered until a year ago. Welcomed by some in the medical community as an advance in patient care, the move is…
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Mixed-heritage Family Deals With Genetic Tragedy
When Rachaeli Fier uttered her first word — abba, or father — her parents had no idea it would be her last. Rachaeli was born a perfect baby girl, a “designer baby,” as the hospital’s delivery staff called her. Now, Eric and Nicole Fier watch helplessly as Rachaeli spirals downward in rapid, steady regression. Two-and-a-half-year-old…
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Breast Cancer Test Patent Causing a Furor
An American firm’s new European patent on a screening test for a genetic mutation that causes breast cancer has created an uproar among geneticists in Israel and Europe, who say the patent raises ethical questions because it targets Ashkenazic Jews. The firm, Myriad Genetics, of Salt Lake City, Utah, was granted the European patent for…
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Zebrafish Provide Key to Unlocking Secrets of Fanconi Anemia
The zebrafish, an inch-long fish indigenous to the Ganges River in East India and Burma, is proving to be a useful animal for understanding Fanconi Anemia. Drs. John Postlethwait and Tom Titus of the University of Oregon’s Institute of Neuroscience told the Forward that they have almost completed mapping the protein sequence of the last…
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Gene Found for Dystonia-related Disorder
Scientists have unlocked the gene responsible for a rare and debilitating genetic disorder. Rapid-onset dystonia-parkinsonism, or RDP, is a rare genetic disorder whose sufferers share symptoms with both dystonia and Parkinson’s disease. In an article published in the July 21 issue of the neuroscience journal Neuron, a research team detailed its discovery that six unique…
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Looking Back August 5, 2005
100 YEARS AGO IN THE FORWARD Galician childhood sweethearts Avrom and Dvosye Laykin had been happily married for 11 years. Their breakup has shocked the Lower East Side — not because of the split per se, but on account of the reasons behind it. In the official court documents, it says that after 11 years,…
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Cord Blood Transplants Eyed As Therapy for Some Diseases
In a medical development with potentially far-reaching effects, researchers have transplanted cord blood into newborns with a rare genetic disease, preserving their brain development and performing a life-saving treatment for babies with a fatal genetic disorder. Scientists from Duke University Medical Center and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, infused cord blood stem…
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