Genetic Diseases Bookclub

This OLLI class is primarily a discussion-centered book club: We will read and discuss Inside the O’Briens by Lisa Genova and Mercies in Disguise by Gina Kolata, two unforgettable books, one fiction and one fact, that tell how two families confronted tragic and inscrutable diseases that were tearing them apart.

These moving stories also include some fascinating genetic and epidemiological studies, so I will help us over any rough spots by providing some background info online and will also be ready to answer any questions about the research.

Inside the O'Briens is a fictional but realistic story of a traditional Boston family that begins to realize that the father is showing symptoms of a tragic and deadly neurodegenerative disease - and that some of the children may have inherited the gene that causes it.

Mercies in Disguise tells three powerful true stories. One relates how the Baxley family comes to realize that the father has a brutal neurological disease that no one can diagnose or treat - and then to discover that the disease is inherited. The second, wild, story describes how Carleton Gajdusek, a brilliant, strange and obsessed young physician discovered the cause of kuru, a transmissible disease that was killing native people in remote jungles of New Guinea. And the third story relates how Stanley Prusiner (a Walnut Hills HS graduate!) discovered a neurological disease that could be transmitted from one person to another, seemingly by a virus. But based on his experiments, he proposed a completely new idea that other researchers thought was just crazy! Both Gajdusek and Prusiner eventually won Nobel Prizes - and their discoveries enabled the courageous young daughter of Ted Baxley to bring an end to the chain of inheritance that was destroying generations of the Baxley family