I took care of young adults with cystic fibrosis when I was in my residency training and found this to be a disease that was desperately in need of some explanation.
My own area of expertise is the genetics of human disease. I was fortunate to be part of the team that found the genes for cystic fibrosis, and Huntington's disease and neurofibromatosis.
While there is no cure, cystic fibrosis is so close to being a livable disease. There is a lot of hope.
When one teenager dying of cystic fibrosis asked me, 'Why am I different?' I answered, 'Tony, because it makes you beautiful.' He loved my answer because he knew full well how much he had done for the world and that he would be immortal through his love and the fund raising of those who knew him hoping to find a cure for cystic fibrosis.
To go to hospitals and see people fight and overcome cystic fibrosis or cancer or any number of illnesses is to see courage that is humbling. And athletes constantly need to be humbled.
There's already a lot of active research going on using the Crispr technology to fix diseases like Duchenne muscular dystrophy or cystic fibrosis or Huntington's disease. They're all diseases that have known genetic causes, and we now have the technology that can repair those mutations to provide, we hope, patients with a normal life.
I made some friends at Listerine and they taught me a little bit about oral care. That half of adults suffer from oral disease, that the number one chronic disease among children is oral disease, that we're only taking care of 25% of our mouths when brushing alone and there are more germs in your mouth than there are people on the planet.
Palliative care is something that you don't know you need until you're in the space where you need it, either from someone who has a terminal disease, like my mother, or for people who live with chronic disease and have particular issues that need care.
Because I lost a daughter, eight years old, to cystic fibrosis, I think that anytime that I'm dealing with people who, like Andrea Yeager, are trying to help those sick children, I identify very much with them.
The research center at VCU has really done a great job of welcoming us in and we've contributed a lot of money to them because they do a lot of the research for cystic fibrosis.
Personally, I had a close friend with cystic fibrosis. I won't ever forget how he handled himself. In the face of extreme challenges and very harrowing circumstances, he maintained a positive outlook and was just very dignified, even in his suffering.
A scenario is, everyone takes gene therapy - not just curing rare diseases like cystic fibrosis, but diseases that everyone has, like aging.
Of course we need children! Adults need children in their lives to listen to and care for, to keep their imagination fresh and their hearts young and to make the future a reality for which they are willing to work.
When I was a young boy, very young boy, mothers didn't work. Women were home, they took care of the house, they washed the dishes and took care of the children. That's what they did, and that's what my mother did.
Young people ask me for advice, and I tell them to do what I didn't do. Get some training. I took jobs that required talents I didn't have.
Tony Campolo and I both speak a lot, and we began to notice that there were some crowds of old folks that desperately needed some youthful energy, and there were other crowds of young folks that desperately needed some aged wisdom.
No one thinks that young adults read hooks for YOUNG ADULTS, books for young adults are read by kids.