Current Events: Why Does the Same Mutation Kill One Person but Not Another?

Different people have different reactions to different gentic disorders, such as schizophrenia or breat cancer. These different affects are say 1 person has the mutations that can develop into that disease, wheas person 2 can have the same mutations and never develop the disease. THis isn't just people who have a different genetic layout and just the same mutations but studies have shown that two identical twins can even have a different outcome than the other twin. So why does this happen?

For many decades now scientific genetic researchers have been studing the role that genetic mutaions play as well as the environmental affects have on the development of diseases.As one of the more commen researchers says Alejandro Burga, "However, genetic and environmental difference are not enough. In the last decade we have larned by studying very simple organisims such as bacteria that gene exzpression -- the extent to which a gene is turned on or off -- varies greatly among individuals, evne in the abcense of genetic and evnronment variation. Tow cells are not completely identical and someimtes these differences have thier origin in random or stochasitc processes. The results of our study show that this type of variation can be an important infulence on the phneotype of animals, and that its measurment can help to reliably predict the chance of developing an abnormal phenotype such as a disease.


These recent scientistis works show that even if they managae to completely understand all of the genes that are important in the inheriting of the genetic disease. However they may have found a way to predict what will happen to each person from looking at their genome sequence. Though when doing this they need to remember that genese are turned on or off in each person.