Recently a middle-aged woman I know was diagnosed with breast cancer. She’s undergone surgery, and I hope she does really well. Her daughter, who’s aged in her early twenties, has apparently been offered a screening test to determine if she’s inherited the breast cancer gene. I don’t know whether or not she’ll accept. But it’s an interesting question. If it was you, would you want to know? Sweetheart Vivienne faces a similar dilemma in relation to the Alzheimer’s disease that’s afflicting her mother. But her mother’s Alzheimer’s is late-onset which, research shows, is much less strongly genetically transmitted than the early-onset form. Enter Sergey Brin (pictured), a co-founder of Google. Brin’s mother has Parkinson’s Disease, and recently Mr Brin, at age 35, discovered he’s inherited a genetic mutation predisposing him to Parkinson’s with a 20-80% likelihood. When asked whether ignorance was not bliss in such matters, he replied that his knowledge of the genetic mutation means he can now take measures to ward off the disease. His point is that knowledge is always preferable to ignorance. Armed with it, he can encourage and fund the appropriate research. He regards his genetic mutation as a bug in his personal code – no different from the bugs in computer code that Google’s engineers fix every day. If only life and the human body were that simple.
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