Curative

“Lupus, doctors like to say, affects no two patients the same. The disease causes the immune system to go rogue in a way that can strike virtually any organ in the body, but when and where is maddeningly elusive. One patient might have lesions on the face, likened to wolf bites by the 13th-century physician who gave lupus its name. Another patient might have kidney failure. Another, fluid around the lungs. What doctors can say to every patient, though, is that they will have lupus for the rest of their life. The origins of autoimmune diseases like it are often mysterious, and an immune system that sees the body it inhabits as an enemy will never completely relax. Lupus cannot be cured. No autoimmune disease can be cured.” But there is a new treatment that could be upending that reality. Sarah Zhang in The Atlantic (Gift Article): A ‘Crazy’ Idea for Treating Autoimmune Diseases Might Actually Work.

+ Related: The Cure has a new album that’s getting great reviews.

+ “Jennifer Doudna, one of the inventors of the breakthrough gene-editing tool CRISPR, says the technology will help the world grapple with the growing risks of climate change by delivering crops and animals better suited to hotter, drier, wetter, or weirder conditions.” James Temple: How a breakthrough gene-editing tool will help the world cope with climate change.