The man who discovered DNA, Frederick Miescher, was a young physician who worked in the laboratory of physiological chemistry of eminent scientist Felix Hoppe-Seyler. At the time of the discovery he was 25 years old and had not long graduated from his studies.
A little over 5,600 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with ALS each year. (That's a new victim every 90 minutes.) It is estimated that as many as 30,000 Americans have the disease at any given time. 80% of the people with ALS are men and 93% of patients are Caucasian. Most people who develop ALS are between the ages of 40 and 70, with an average age of 55 at the time of diagnosis. However, cases of the disease do occur in persons in their twenties and thirties.
1 ALS is not contagious. 2  Although the life expectancy of a person with ALS averages about two to five years from the time of diagnosis, this disease is variable, and many people can live with the disease for five years and more. While the average survival time is 3 years, about twenty percent of people with ALS live five years, 10 percent will survive ten years and five percent will live 20 years or more. 2  Progression is not always a straight line in an individual either.