Revisiting Sam Berns - NYTimes.com In 2005, our contributing writer Robin Marantz Henig wrote about Sam Berns, an engaging 8-year-old boy with a rare "premature aging" disease called progeria. It was a disease that, in all likelihood, would kill him by the time he was a teenager. So imagine my delight and surprise, when listening to National Public Radio the other night, that I heard Sam Berns, now 15, sounding confident and chipper (listen at the 6:33 mark) as he described playing drums in his school marching band. When Sam was a baby, his mother, Leslie Gordon, a physician and researcher, summoned her know-how and fierce maternal protectiveness to search for a cure for progeria. When Henig wrote her article, researchers had recently discovered the genetic malfunction that causes the disease. It was an amazing find, but it was only a first step. The next bit of incredible luck was that an existing drug seemed promising in lab mice, and in 2007, a human study began. The results of that study - the news hook for the NPR story - indicated that the drug is effective in preventing the heart attacks and strokes that are the usual cause of death in children with progeria. Re-reading Henig's story, I was struck by Gordon's sense of urgency (and the fact that Sam was playing drums back then, too): She has, in emotional terms, set herself an impossible task. Already she is devastated by the death of every child with progeria. "I know objectively that it's not my fault," she said. But still that's how I feel, like I should have gone faster. I ask myself: Should we have done more? Should we have done it better? . . . "Everybody talks about how fast we're going," Gordon said, taking a phone interview while waiting to pick up Sam from his drum lessons. But the truth is, we're not going fast enough. The drug isn't a cure for progeria, but by the standards of slow, plodding scientific research, it's been quite a sprint.