Beorn
02-01-2012, 04:01 PM
by Jeff Wheelwright From the December 2011 issue (http://discovermagazine.com/2011/dec); published online for subscribers only on January 30, 2012
Shonnie Medina was a happy girl who felt she would die young. Her physical beauty, when she was a young woman in Culebra and a young wife in Alamosa, was the primary thing that people mentioned about her. Photographs and snatches of videotape don’t quite capture it because fundamentally what people were talking about was charisma. It came through her looks when she was in front of you, tossing her full head of dark hair and giving you her full attention. Then her beauty acted like a mooring for her other outward qualities, undulating from that holdfast like fronds of kelp on the sea. Then Shonnie was magnetic, vain, kind to others, religious without reservation, funny, a little goofy, and headstrong.
The gene Shonnie inherited, known as BRCA1.185delAG, also has a long pedigree. Its discovery in the Hispano community confirmed events of half a millennium before in Spain that are echoing still. Most likely the mutation arrived by way of Sephardic Jews who converted to Catholicism under pressure from the Spanish Inquisition. From Spain they traveled to the New World, where eventually they seeded the modern Hispano population. Indian blood and new terrain erased part of the history those emigrants carried, assuming they were even aware of their Jewish legacy. For the Hispano Catholic people of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, Jewish ancestry was a will-o’-the-wisp of memory and culture, which many people had heard about without knowing if it was true. Shonnie’s mutation shows that it is.
The breast-cancer mutation 185delAG entered the gene pool of Jews some 2,500 years ago, around the time they were exiled to Babylon. Random and unbidden, the mutation appeared on the chromosome of a single person, who is known as the founder. In the same sense that Abraham is said to have founded the Jewish people, scientists call the person at the top of a genetic pyramid a founder...
Source (http://discovermagazine.com/2011/dec/17-lethal-gene-emerged-ancient-palestine)
Shonnie Medina was a happy girl who felt she would die young. Her physical beauty, when she was a young woman in Culebra and a young wife in Alamosa, was the primary thing that people mentioned about her. Photographs and snatches of videotape don’t quite capture it because fundamentally what people were talking about was charisma. It came through her looks when she was in front of you, tossing her full head of dark hair and giving you her full attention. Then her beauty acted like a mooring for her other outward qualities, undulating from that holdfast like fronds of kelp on the sea. Then Shonnie was magnetic, vain, kind to others, religious without reservation, funny, a little goofy, and headstrong.
The gene Shonnie inherited, known as BRCA1.185delAG, also has a long pedigree. Its discovery in the Hispano community confirmed events of half a millennium before in Spain that are echoing still. Most likely the mutation arrived by way of Sephardic Jews who converted to Catholicism under pressure from the Spanish Inquisition. From Spain they traveled to the New World, where eventually they seeded the modern Hispano population. Indian blood and new terrain erased part of the history those emigrants carried, assuming they were even aware of their Jewish legacy. For the Hispano Catholic people of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, Jewish ancestry was a will-o’-the-wisp of memory and culture, which many people had heard about without knowing if it was true. Shonnie’s mutation shows that it is.
The breast-cancer mutation 185delAG entered the gene pool of Jews some 2,500 years ago, around the time they were exiled to Babylon. Random and unbidden, the mutation appeared on the chromosome of a single person, who is known as the founder. In the same sense that Abraham is said to have founded the Jewish people, scientists call the person at the top of a genetic pyramid a founder...
Source (http://discovermagazine.com/2011/dec/17-lethal-gene-emerged-ancient-palestine)