My Daughter's DNA
One father's search for the scientific answers
that no one seemed to have
Hugh Young Rienhoff Jr. | Make Vol. 15- 2008 | Pdf | 4 pgs | 2 mb
If you scrape the inside of your cheek
with a pop-sicle stick and mix it with a few homely
salts and a shot of grain alcohol, you'll see a
fluffy cloud of material floating in the glass.
It looks like cotton, but it's really the code of
you. DNA is deceptively ordinary-looking.
The human genome - the totality of each person's
genes within their body - is a vast chemical space
with 6.6 billion bits of DNA information that con-
stitutes genetically what we are as Homo sapiens.
In that vastness, it's easy for a single deviant bit of
DNA to hide. I suspected that. like many of those
with genetic conditions, my daughter also had a
single DNA base that was awry. Finding that variant
is like looking for a single person in a world of 6 billion
people. It's a near-impossible task unless you have
clues for where to look, for which genes might be
altered. Clues like this always begin with the patient.
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