Deal of the Genes

I stayed overnight at my mother's, and yesterday morning washed and dried my hair there. Mom's hairdryer was a basic model with two settings: blow-on-your-soup and sirocco. Using the first setting meant I would need a long time to dry my hair; using the second meant I could dry my hair relatively quickly but it would be difficult to style with my hair blowing all over the place. I used a combination of the two settings with air drying and didn't bother much with styling.

I usually take my thick hair for granted. But yesterday I started wondering how I ended up as the only member of my immediate family with thick hair. That got me thinking about genes. My mother jokes that we three kids got the all the worse genes--my father's bad eyesight and her bad teeth.

Hair, eyes and teeth are things we can see and then attribute to our genes. What about other characteristics that are harder to see or measure?

Learning more about specific genes can be both a boon and a curse. My sister died of breast cancer. A few years after that, my mother received her diagnosis of breast cancer, raising the issue of whether we carried one of the two breast cancer genes (BRCA1 and BRCA2.)

While I worried about getting the disease, I was more concerned about testing positive for those genes and becoming uninsurable. My doctor assured me that current laws would protect me but I still worried about what people and companies could do with that knowledge.

Ultimately, my mother underwent the genetic testing and results showed that she did not carry BRCA1 nor BRCA2, and I didn't inherit the genes from her. While that's no guarantee I'll avoid breast cancer, it was a relief to learn I won't have to deal with that genetic hand.