RNAi - World Shaking Discoveries

We, as humans, may have just recently discovered the key to defeating all known disease.  This is real and people are working on it right now.  What is it?  RNAi or Interference RNA.  If you want to learn something amazing, check out this Nova RNAi presentation.

In a nut shell, a guy discovered RNAi by accident (all the best discoveries happen by accident, right?).  Basically a clever use of RNAi allows you to turn off any individual gene(s) within a living thing.  This gives you the key to entire genomes.  You can map exactly what each gene does within any living organism!

Yeah, but how does it fight disease, you ask?  Well, it was discovered that RNAi acts as a defense mechanism at the cellular level.  When RNAi sees protein instructions (regular RNA) that it doesn't expect to see (like when a virus injects it's own RNA into the cell) it begins to destroy the imposter instructions.  However!  It ALSO destroys any other instructions that LOOK LIKE the imposter instructions.  This is key.

Say that you have macular degeneration.  This means that your optic nerve area is producing too many blood vessels because you have a faulty gene that is producing too many instructions to build blood vessels.  How do you force these cells to stop making blood vessels?  Introduce an imposter instruction that says "make more blood vessels".  The RNAi will see this and destroy it... and then it will also destroy the legitimate instructions to create blood vessels.  The result is a significant decrease in the production of blood vessels!

You told it to build more, but it ends up building less.  Amazing.