This Mortal Coil: A History of Death by Andrew Doig

Author:Andrew Doig [Doig, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781526624406
Google: hJxCEAAAQBAJ
Published: 2022-02-03T14:47:44+00:00

PART IV

A LETHAL INHERITANCE

All things are hidden, obscure and debatable if the cause of the phenomena is unknown, but everything is clear if its cause be known.

Louis Pasteur, Germ Theory and Its Applications

to Medicine and Surgery, 18781

14

Woody Guthrie and the Blonde Angel of Venezuela

That children resemble their parents, and that medical conditions can be passed on down the generations, has been known for thousands of years. An easy-to-see example of this is polydactyly – being born with extra fingers or toes. In 1752, Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, president of the Berlin Academy of Science, reported on the Ruhe family of Berlin, which showed the trait in three generations and eighteen individuals. Polydactyly could be inherited from either the father or mother.1 Inheriting other, more damaging, mutations can cause disease.

Genetic disease has been around for billions of years, ever since life started, since errors in copying DNA are inevitable. Here we shall look at four types of genetic disease: dominant, where the relevant mutation need only be inherited from one parent; recessive, where it must be inherited from both; sex-linked, where typically men can show a disease, while women are symptom-free carriers; and polygenic, where a huge number of variations in DNA change the likelihood of getting a disease. We shall see how long and careful study of selected conditions led to breakthroughs in understanding how genetic disease happens.

To date, managing the symptoms of genetic disease is all that we can ever do, as permanent cures that would spare people and their descendants would require altering our DNA. Since our DNA is present in every one of the trillions of cells that make up our bodies, tackling this root cause has always seemed to be an impossibility. Recently, however, outstanding breakthroughs in molecular biology have brought the dream of curing genetic disease once and for all within reach, potentially benefiting not just a patient, but all their descendants. Before we see how this might be done, let us find out how a folk singer, an American family and a South American village led to the discovery of the location of a disease gene within our DNA for the first time.

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born on 14 July 1912, in Okemah, Oklahoma. In 1920 oil was discovered nearby, and the town was briefly transformed into a boom town. A few years later, the oil suddenly ran out and the local economy crashed. Woody therefore travelled south to Texas in 1931, where he married Mary Jennings, had three children and started performing music in bands. In the 1930s, the economic downturn of the Depression was made even worse in the US Midwest by the Dust Bowl. The conversion of grassland into cropland, followed by years of drought, led to massive dust storms where the fragile topsoil was blown away, ruining thousands of farms. Woody was one of the poverty-stricken ‘Okies’ who left the devastated prairies to seek work out west. Leaving his family behind, Woody hitch-hiked, rode freight trains and walked along Route 66 in search of the promised land of California.

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