9. In 2006, some of Carroll's lab mates made a breakthrough in their work with a strain of mice engineered to carry the human gene for Huntington's.

Why was their work considered a breakthrough?

It was considered really important because it showed how the levels of toxic proteins that are in the brain can be lowered, and obviously this is considered a very big step in the possibility to stop a deadly disease as Huntington's is.

Huntington's disease is a disease that is simply devastating, not only to the person that suffers it, but also to the family. Technically it is a brain disease, but the way patients generally describe it is as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and motor neurone disease combined.