Barbara Zeughauser had lost so many relatives to cancer: Her mother, her uncle, her grandmother, her second cousin. She thought that ghost in the family line might come after her, too. So in 2009, Zeughauser took a test offered by Myriad Genetics. It analyzed her DNA for mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes that can make cancer more likely than not, raising the lifetime risk of breastcancer in women to between 55 and 85 percent, and to between 10 and 70 percent for ovariancancer.
Zeughauser was lucky and unlucky. She got a clear, unambiguous, and accurate answer from the test: She had a bad mutation. But she’d found it before she got cancer. She decided to have her ovaries removed and later had a double mastectomy, reducing her risk to almost average.
Her cousin Ken Deutsch wasn’t so lucky. In 2014, he was hit with bladder cancer. He also went...
What We Inheritby Sam Trejo and Daphne O. Martschenko; andOriginal Sin by Kathryn Paige Harden have a great deal in common, with substantial differences in style and emphasis. Both books attempt, in different ways, to show the reader just where current research into human genomics stands, where that might be going, and why the authors are interested. In short, the influence of genomic research on our societies is already large and seems likely to change them in ways...
The pseudoscience of eugenics, founded on the mistaken notion that nature envisions some “right” combination of genes, and that selective breeding can improve the human race, is making a comeback. While the heyday of eugenics was a century ago, the...
By Emily Packard Dawson and Lainie Friedman Ross, MedPage Today | 08.18.2026
Aggregated News
Few things evoke a greater sense of desperation than a parent seeking an experimental treatment for their child. That desperation can make even extraordinary risks seem worth taking. This dynamic has come into stark relief after Mei, a 6-year-old girl...
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