Last night I posted a screed about a “politics” forum in Carbon County that permits anonymous posts and is consequently worthless. Fortunately, the internet can be used for more than porn, anonymous attacks, and cat videos. Here’s an example.
One in two million people suffers from a disease in which the body grows extra bones. As new bones grow, sufferers experience less and less flexibility. As you might expect, if you have a disease that rare, how do you connect with other people who have the same condition?
Using the internet, Jeanne Peeper, who suffers from fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, has put together a global network of hundreds of victims of the condition. She has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to provide research grants. She has been in contact with doctors who study the disease.
There has been progress. An article in the June 2013 issue of The Atlantic by Carl Zimmer details some of the advances made in fighting the disease. The article notes that if researchers can discover the trigger that causes extraneous bone development, they might also be able to replicate the process for people with osteoporosis or other bone diseases.
The point is that none of this--the contacts, the network, the research--would have happened without the internet. That’s so much more valuable than a bunch of malcontents posting anonymous insults.
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