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Neuroscientist James Fallon's mom Jenny said, "Jim, why don't you find out about your father's relatives? I think there were some cuckoos back there."
He took her up on the suggestion, he told NPR. A brain scan later, the man who had spent 20 years studying criminal minds learned that he -- alone among his immediate family -- had the brain of a person given to violent crime. A scan of his lineage revealed that a great-grandfather hanged for killing his mother. Also? Lizzie Borden, she of the 40 whacks of an axe that supposedly killed her parents? A distant cousin.
You know what they say: you learn something new every day. And sometimes it'll blow your mind.
Fallon goes on to say that he believes his relatively inactive orbital cortex -- a supposed sign of poor choices and aggressive tendencies -- was balanced out by a happy childhood. A history of abuse in the home is usually the trigger, he said, for people with similar brains who go on to hurt others in adulthood. It's a sign, anyway, that although genetic testing can tell you part of the story about your possibilities and challenges, there are other variables that scans and tests can't touch.
As a person with a congenital birth defect myself -- a cleft lip and palate -- I could have had genetic testing, I guess. I've just never seen the point, and not just because explanations like this make my head hurt. I haven't tried to conceive a child and even if I had and that child turned up with the same condition, it would have made absolutely no difference to me. The prospect would not have deterred me from getting pregnant, and ultrasounds would have likely shown me everything I needed to know to prepare emotionally and logistically. I do wonder sometimes why this happened to me, when there is no known history of clefts on either side of my family, but I came to terms with it long ago.
Plus, when you spend the first 12 years of your life going through one surgical procedure after another, it all kind of runs together, but that was years before companies like 23andme could sell me an over-the-counter genetics test and I could cross my fingers that they wouldn't send my result to the wrong people.
Others undergo genetic testing to inform themselves about possibilities and plan for the future. BlogHer Political Director Erin Kotecki-Vest went through it after watching many family members get cancer. She wanted to know what her chances were, and to be prepared as early as possible if need be.
Yes, I was nervous. The thought of finding out my likelihood of getting cancer over the course of my life was daunting. But I felt it was the most pro-active thing I could do in a sea of uncertainty. I also felt as though if I KNEW, I could do something about it. There are a lot of people who don't want to know. Who would prefer just finding out when they get cancer that they have cancer and deal with it then. I wanted to get it before it started. I wanted to be on top of it. I wanted to say I did everything I could.
"Why do you want to get tested? What difference would it make in your life? And what would you do differently as a result?"
In the years that I was a counselor working with families, these were the questions I always asked adult children of people with Alzheimer's Disease.
Opportunities for
