Range by David Epstein

Author:David Epstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

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The email subject line caught my eye: “Olympic medalist and muscular dystrophy patient with the same mutation.”

I had just written a book on genetics and athleticism, and figured it would point to some journal article I had missed. Instead, it was a note from the muscular dystrophy patient herself, Jill Viles, a thirty-nine-year-old woman in Iowa. She had an elaborate theory connecting the gene mutation that withered her muscles to those of an Olympic sprinter, and she offered to send more info.

I expected a letter, maybe some news clippings. I got a stack of original family photos, a detailed medical history, and a nineteen-page, bound and illustrated packet that referenced gene mutations by their specific DNA locations. She had done some serious homework.

On page 14 there was a photo of Jill in a blue bikini, blonde hair tousled, smiling and sitting in the sand. Her torso looks normal, but her arms are strikingly skinny, like twigs jabbed into a snowman. Her legs did not look like they could possibly hold her, the thigh no wider than her knee joint.

Beside that photo was one of Priscilla Lopes-Schliep, one of the best sprinters in Canadian history. At the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, she won a bronze medal in the 100-meter hurdles. The juxtaposition was breathtaking. Priscilla is midstride, ropes of muscle winding down her legs, veins bursting from her forearms. She’s like the vision of a superhero a second grader might draw. I could hardly have imagined two women who looked less likely to share a biological blueprint.

In online pictures of Priscilla, Jill recognized something in her own, vastly scrawnier physique—a familiar pattern of missing fat on her limbs. Her theory was that she and Priscilla have the same mutated gene, but because Priscilla doesn’t have muscular dystrophy, her body had found some way “to go around it,” as Jill put it, and was instead making gigantic muscles. If her theory was right, Jill hoped, scientists would want to study her and Priscilla to figure out how to help people with muscles like Jill have muscles a little more toward the Priscilla end of the human physique spectrum. She wanted my help convincing Priscilla to get a genetic test.

The idea that a part-time substitute teacher, wielding the cutting-edge medical instrument known as Google Images, would make a discovery about a pro athlete who is examined by doctors as part of her job struck me as somewhere between extremely unlikely and patently nuts. I consulted a Harvard geneticist. He was concerned. “Empowering a relationship between these two women could end badly,” he told me. “People go off the deep end when they are relating to celebrities they think they have a connection to.”

I hadn’t even considered that before; I certainly didn’t want to facilitate a stalker. It took time for Jill to convince me that because of her unique life experience, she could see what no specialist could.

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