Genetic prophecy : beyond the double helix / Zsolt Harsanyi, Richard Hutton.

  • Harsanyi, Zsolt, 1944-
Date:
[1981], ©1981
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Genetic prophecy : beyond the double helix / Zsolt Harsanyi, Richard Hutton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Genes As Prophets who was not: The missing enzyme had become a tool of pre¬ diction; a signal that the disease might someday strike. Motulsky sought out Siniscalco, and the two began to screen the Sardinian schoolchildren. Day after day they would enter a school, draw blood from a hundred fingers, and evaluate the samples in their laboratory, in school clinics, in hotel bathrooms when necessary. Gradually those in danger were located. They were warned to avoid contact with fava beans during the flowering season. As a result, the incidence of hemolytic anemia—and lackadaisical school¬ children—began to decline. Since that time, Motulsky's test has been refined and the impact of the enzyme deficiency has been examined more closely. Today it is known that about 100 million people around the world, including three million Americans, have G-6-PD deficiency, and that hemolytic anemia can be trig¬ gered not only by fava bean pollen but by a whole spectrum of other compounds, from antimalarial and sulfa drugs to as¬ pirin and vitamin K. Because of a genetic marker—a gene that makes it possible to prophesy the future—many of those who are most susceptible to the disease can now consciously avoid the compounds that might cause them harm. Crude forms of prophecy have always been a part of medicine. The Greeks could look at a frail or mongoloid child, accept the inevitability of its hopeless future, and throw it from a clifi'; the German dye industry in the 1890s worked out the relationship between certain chemicals and the high incidence of bladder cancer among some of its em¬ ployees; and modern physicians have long known that if a parent comes down with, for instance, diabetes, chances are greater that his or her children will come down with it too. But the new genetic prophecy is not simply a modest im¬ provement on this kind of general prediction. Instead, it [15]