Why We Still Aren't Disease-Free

When the human genome was first sequenced nearly a decade ago, the world lit up with talk about how new gene-specific drugs would help us cheat death. Well, the verdict is in: Keep eating those greens.

Ernest Hemingway's writing may have tended to the short and sharp, but the man himself was apparently fond of the cuddly and extraneous, at least when it came to kittens with too many toes. A sea-captain friend of Hemingway's, it seems, persuaded him to take in a polydactylic cat, and that cat became the progenitor of a colony of overly toed felines thriving today in and around the museum in Key West that was Hemingway's home. The patterns of inheritance among those cats have even helped shed a bit of light on certain defects in human DNA. And so it is that Papa retroactively became an early contributor to the science of the human genome.

I learn this from Nadav Ahituv, a rising-star geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco, Medical Center, who studies the genetic roots of limb-related defects, obesity, and drug absorption. Congenital defects hold a special significance for Ahituv: As a teenager, he was in a body brace for three years with scoliosis. "It was not fun," he says. "I spent my time reading Kafka, and then I started in on genetics textbooks, thinking that if I could understand what had gone wrong with me, maybe I could find a way to help others."

It must have been time well spent, because Ahituv, a fit-looking fellow who gets to work by propelling a folding bike up the city's famously steep hills, has shown an uncanny knack for tracking human traits and disorders down to specific sections of DNA. He can now point out limb-altering segments of chromosomes as easily and precisely as he might map out coffee shops in the Lower Haight. Read the entire article.

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