Tribute : Sam Berns (1996-2014)

We hope you must know him, inspirational Sam Berns. Though he lived short, he inspired many people to take life positive and happy.

Sampson “Sam” Gordon Berns (October 23, 1996 – January 10, 2014) was an American who suffered from progeria and helped raise awareness about the disease.

He was the subject of the HBO documentary Life According to Sam is about one family’s courageous fight to save their only son from a rare and fatal disease, progeria. The average age of death from progeria is 13, there is no treatment, and no cure. Dr. Leslie Gordon and Dr. Scott Berns are set on changing this. When their son Sam, now 16 years old, was diagnosed with progeria at age two, doctors told Leslie and Scott to enjoy Sam while they could. They refused to believe this was the answer. In less than a decade, their advances have led to identifying the gene at fault, creating the first drug trials for treatment, and revealing the amazing discovery that progeria is linked to the aging process in all of us. – IMDB

In Memory of Sam Berns :

This is an excerpt from Dr. Francis Collins (Whom Sam mentioned as his friend on the TEDEX Video above)

…In a heartbreaking phone call from his parents, I learned of the death of Sam Berns, a courageous young man with Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome. Sam may have only lived 17 years, but in his short life he taught the rest of us a lot about how to live.

Sam’s parents, Scott Berns and Leslie Gordon, both physicians, introduced me to Sam more than a decade ago. At that time, no one knew the cause of this extremely rare disease that causes children to age at a dramatically accelerated pace, leading to death from heart attack or stroke at the average age of 13…

(click here to read the complete article)

His parents, Scott Berns and Leslie Gordon, both pediatricians, received their son’s diagnosis when he was less than two years of age. Roughly a year later, they established the Progeria Research Foundation in an effort to increase awareness of the condition, to promote research into the underlying causes of and possible treatments for the disease, and to offer resources for the support of sufferers and their families

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Courtesy : A. Noah via YouTube,  Dr. Francis Collins, IMDB and Wikipedia.