Oliver has an acne problem.

Just remember that single acne spot that crippled you for several days.

Many people visited my grandmother, people with severe acne on their faces or warts on their hands.

We changed it to social diseases and people came along with acne and spots, but nobody came with VD any more.

That cancer recurred, and she passed away three years later from lung cancer, but she got three years from a drug whose symptoms predominately were acne.

Cystic fibrosis is an example of a disease where you just have a bad ingredient and you have a disease, and we can actually make a direct correspondence between the ingredient and the disease.

Over the last 40 years, recombinant DNA technology has revolutionized numerous industrial sectors, including agriculture and pharmaceuticals. It has enabled the development of vaccines against infectious diseases and drugs that treat non infectious illnesses like diabetes, cancer, cystic fibrosis, psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, and some genetic disorders.

From her, I learned, amongst many other things, one very precious lesson that if you want to destroy something in this life, be it an acne, a blemish or the human soul, all you need to do is to surround it with thick walls.

But it is widely known that certain mutations can run in families, increasing dramatically the risks of certain diseases for example, breast cancer, sickle cell anemia, and cystic fibrosis. Unfortunately, many human molecular geneticists have abdicated any responsibility for trying to decrease the overall burden of such diseases.

To add to India s woes, Salman Khurshid, the country s bungling foreign minister, initially made light of the deepest Chinese incursion in more than a quarter century. The garrulous minister called the intrusion just one little spot of acne on the otherwise beautiful face of the bilateral relationship a mere blemish that could be treated with an ointment.

Moreover, biomedical research firms are abandoning certain diseases in order to avoid the large scale trials that they require, focusing instead on orphan diseases like cystic fibrosis, which demand smaller clinical trials that have a higher probability of success, leading to drugs that can cost more than 100,000 annually per patient. But, with insurers and payers worldwide becoming increasingly vigilant about controlling costs, this business model s long term prospects are unclear.