This article in the New Yorker is by far the most important article we’ve read to date that defines our purpose and hope for Katherine Belle.  Thanks to the Mights and Wilseys for confirming what we hope to achieve and proving there are other options than just waiting and hoping science “catches up.”  When parents are given no other option but to create websites and post articles with their genetic data to accelerate research and treatments for our dying children, there is a serious problem with the system.   We are an important part of the diagnostic team and can play a critical role in helping decipher the human genome.  My question is why aren’t more journalists talking about this problem?

Matt Might gave a talk titled “Accelerating Rare Disease.” After describing the effects of his blog post, he told the crowd that it was inevitable that parents of children with other newly discovered diseases would form proactive communities, much as he, Cristina, and the Wilseys had done. Vandana Shashi believes that such communities represent a new paradigm for conducting medical research. “It’s kind of a shift in the scientific world that we have to recognize—that, in this day of social media, dedicated, educated, and well-informed families have the ability to make a huge impact,” she told me. “Gone are the days when we could just say, ‘We’re a cloistered community of researchers, and we alone know how to do this.’