Diseases of Interest

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

Susan Sontag

To choose three human diseases to potentially study seems like a monumental task. Do I choose a disease of relevance to me? If so, I would choose something related to coagulation. However, my interests do not lie there; my interests lie in the nervous system and bone marrow, the origin site of many different types of cells. Therefore, the diseases I have chosen are as follows:

• Neurofibromatosis
• Dyskeratosis cogenita
• Pearson syndrome