Webcast Lectures: Cardiovascular Genetics
Presented by HHMI investigators Richard P. Lifton, M.D.,
Ph.D., and Christine E. Seidman, M.D.
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Lecture One—Brave Heart: Circle of Life, by Christine E. Seidman
From hummingbirds to whales, all vertebrates have a muscular
organ that pumps life-sustaining blood throughout the body.
The human heart is roughly the size of a fist and contracts
more than 2 billion times in a lifetime, pumping enough blood
to fill a backyard swimming pool every week. Dr. Seidman will
describe how this powerful muscle accomplishes this amazing
feat of strength and endurance day after day and what happens
when things occasionally go wrong.
Lecture Two—Telltale Genes: Charting Human Disease, by Richard P. Lifton
We are in the midst of one of the great revolutions in the
history of medicine. This revolution is revealing how the
forms of genes we have inherited influence our susceptibility
to disease. In this second lecture of the series, Dr. Richard
Lifton will briefly review our current understanding of the
human genome and the effort to sequence the 3 billion base
pairs of DNA and map the 100,000 genes organized along the
human chromosomes (Note: The first draft of the human genome
was published in 2001. Most researchers have revised their
estimates of the number of genes in the human genome downward,
many to as low as 30,000.)
Lecture Three—Heartbreak: Of Mutations and Maladies, by Christine E. Seidman
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United
States and, while it typically occurs after middle age, even
seemingly fit and healthy young people can die suddenly from
unrecognized heart disease. As Dr. Seidman will point out
in the third lecture of the series, considerable media and
medical attention has been focused on athletes who suffer
cardiovascular collapse while participating in sports. These
dramatic events are usually caused by hypertrophic cardiomyopathy,
a disorder characterized by thickening (hypertrophy) of the
ventricular muscle, sometimes leading to fatal irregular heart
rhythms (arrhythmias).
Lecture Four—The Kidney's Tale: Of Salt and Hypertension, by Richard P. Lifton
Each day, the human kidneys filter nearly 50 gallons of blood
plasma and 3 pounds of salt. Blood courses through the kidney
and other internal organs, driven by the heart pumping blood
through arteries. The blood inside these arteries exerts pressure
on the artery walls. In this final lecture of the series,
Dr. Lifton will explain how high blood pressure, or hypertension,
damages blood vessels, contributing to heart attacks, strokes,
and kidney failure. The control of blood pressure seems deceptively
simple, since it is determined by the amount of blood pumped
by the heart and the resistance to blood flow provided by
the arteries. However, given that many factors regulate each
of these processes, determining the causes of hypertension
has been difficult.
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Webcast Lectures