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Genetic Russian Roulette | Slate Star Codex

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[TRIGGER WARNING: This would be a really bad post to read if you have or are about to have a young child] I. One of the downsides to working in psychiatry is that it is slowly but inexorably sapping away first my enthusiasm about, and now even my willingness to, have children. Medicine was bad enough. It wasn’t the kids who get leukaemia at age seven and die who got to me. It was the ones with syndromes. Down Syndrome is the one everyone knows about, but by no means the worst. Lesch-Nyhan Syndrome is a lovely little condition in which children are born without the ability to metabolize uric acid properly. The results include severe mental retardation, stereotyped jerking movements of the limbs, face frozen in a permanent grimace, and something the textbooks charmingly refer to as “involuntary writhing”. For poorly understood reasons, these children also exhibit “uncontrollable self-injury”, usually head-banging and trying to bite any part of their body within reach of their mouth – som

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