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Retired on my 55th birthday after getting a cardiac stent, four years later I got a second cardiac stent.  18 months ago my speech started slurring and an MRI of my brain resulted in the discovery of two strokes.  Now I have been diagnosed as having Bulbar ALS.  Myasthenia gravis was considered by two successive blood tests did not confirm that possibility.  My speech, swallowing, have degraded severely, I cough much more and I am producing more mucus and sputum.  After 152 years, since ALS was identified by the French Neurologist Dr. Jean Martin Charcot, some cures are finally popping up.  I hope I can be tested by one or both but I am not sure I will be alive long enough to benefit by them: NU-9 and WA-004.  I am curious about stem cells, and they are bring researched too, and CRISPR.  As 69 year old male I have lost two maternal first cousins have succumbed to ALS.  I suspect that ALS is all attributable to genetics.  Familial victims have only been attributed to 5% to 10% of all ALS victims, the other 90%-95% are diagnosed as sporadic.  I think it all goes back to our genetics.  We will never know what our distant ancestors might have passed the genetics on to us now, not only for ALS and Cancers, and other maladies that afflict us as we get older, resulting in our deaths.  Life expectancy has only increased dramatically since medical developments such as aseptic practices in medicine in the 1890s, antibiotics, and pharmaceuticals  Genetics is now being researched to identify mutated genes that afflict us.