Samuel Qin, an 11th grade student at Shenzhen College of International Education, has been a passionate student of life sciences since he was a child, and has spent his vacations visiting biology laboratories at the Institute of Genetics and Development of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Stanford University, UC San Diego, UC Riverside, and Wuhan University, among other institutions. Since entering high school, he has a keen interest in the academic study of biology, and while balancing the refinement of the whole subject, he has already finished the university biology-related courses on his own and won gold medals in several biochemistry international competitions and Olympiads.

         My interest in founding the website has all started in last year’s summer. I met Professor Shen graduated from Harvard University. He is a genetic counselor who dedicated to help couples that are puzzled by the genetic disorders that their children suffer from. I was lucky enough to audit one of his remote counseling with one of those desperate couple: they had three children in total, and none of them made it three days after they born. Before coming to Professor Shen, they thought it was the hospitals’ responsibility: They even tried to sue the hospitals, even though they are the top ones in Hong Kong. After weeks of analysis, Professor Shen told them: “the babies all have the same type of gene mutations that disabled them to synthesize lactose by themselves. After using up the lactose from their mother, they died almost immediately.”

        This is the first time I feel that such miserable misshapen is so close to me. In 2018, approximately 350 million individuals worldwide currently live with rare disorders and roughly 80 percent of these rare disorders have a genetic basis, and a staggering 95 percent of them lack any approved treatments sanctioned by the FDA. I was shocked by these astonishing numbers, realizing that these disorders take place more frequently than we thought yet gaining little attentions and proper treatments. Although the number may seem to be an only small proportion of the world population, the families of these patients are also living in pain, making rare genetic disorders a non-negligible. The other major problem faced by the whole mankind is that the importance of genetic counseling is not understood by most of the people. Professor Shen told me that 90% of his cases are postnatal, which means that misery has already happened to the children and the family. Too late. Only when people know they should check whether they carry genes that might lead to the genetic disorders can the cases of genetic disorder decrease because of preproduction interference. My interest towards genetics soars to a peak, driven by my responsibility to help folks suffering from rare genetic diseases. Therefore, I have created this website, aiming to popularize the knowledge of genetic diseases for the general readers, provide channels for genetic counseling and volunteer activities to help patients in a realistic sense. I hope that this website can raise people's awareness of genetic diseases, thus gathering attention on this issue that is ignored by many people. As the name of the website suggests, we should really start to pay attention to genetic diseases.