Somewhere in the world are 13 incredibly lucky people. Although they do not know it, each inherited a mutated gene that causes a fatal or terribly debilitating disease in infancy or childhood — but these people are adults, and healthy.
Their DNA may hold clues to treating others who did not escape the gene’s effects.
That is the conclusion of a paper, published Monday in the journal Nature Biotechnology, in which researchers searched databases containing genetic sequences from nearly 600,000 healthy adults and found these remarkable 13.