On the recordOctober 20, 2015
I am very excited today to congratulate the researchers from the Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University in my hometown of Houston. On Monday, they announced an important discovery about the structure of human genetic material, an advance that one day could enable scientists to fix genetic defects that lead to disease. This was in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors included experts from Stanford, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, who brought about this particular research, described the process through which a 6-foot-long string of human DNA folds and organizes itself. The main excitement about this is that to the many children, to the many young people, to the many families who suffer the loss of a child through a deadly disease, we now have research that may alter that process and impact, if you will, the DNA that results in diseases that cause the death of our children. Let me congratulate Baylor and Rice University for this great success, and we look forward to saving lives from Houston, Texas. ____________________
