For Kids with Progeria, New Therapies May Offer Revolutionary Hope for a Longer Life

For Kids with Progeria, New Therapies May Offer Revolutionary Hope for a Longer Life

Sammy Basso is one of around 400 young people in the world with progeria.

Courtesy of Basso

Sammy Basso has some profound ideas about fate. As long as he has been alive, he has known he has minimal control over his own. His parents, however, had to transition from a world of unlimited possibility to one in which their son might not live to his 20s.

"I remember very clearly that day because Sammy was three years old," his mother says of the day a genetic counselor diagnosed Sammy with progeria. "It was a devastating day for me."

But to Sammy, he has always been himself: a smart kid, interested in science, a little smaller than his classmates, with one notable kink in his DNA. In one copy of the gene that codes for the protein Lamin A, Sammy has a T where there should be a C. The incorrect code creates a toxic protein called progerin, which destabilizes Sammy's cells and makes him age much faster than a person who doesn't have the mutation. The older he gets, the more he is in danger of strokes, heart failure, or a heart attack. "I am okay with my situation," he says from his home in Tezze sul Brenta, Italy. "But I think, yes, fate has a great role in my life."

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Jacqueline Detwiler-George
Jacqueline Detwiler is a contributing editor to Popular Mechanics and former host of The Most Useful Podcast Ever. She writes about science, adventure, travel, and technology. For stories, she has embedded with high school students in Indianapolis, jumped out of a plane with a member of the Red Bull Air Force, and travelled the country searching for the cure for cancer. Most recently, she trailed the Baltimore Police Department's Crime Scene Investigation team for a book for Simon & Schuster's Masters at Work series.
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