The Dead of Night

The Guardian has published an edited extract from a book called The Family That Couldn’t Sleep – A Venetian Medical Mystery, written by DT Max. Simultaneously fascinating and horrifying, it’s well worth reading. Oh, and the Guardian‘s links to the second part of the extract are currently broken, you’ll find it here. 

 

The thing that I find the most troublesome is that the disease – Fatal Familial Insomia (FFI) – is apparently passed on to 50% of the children of a person carrying FFI. The disease strikes and kills the carrier after child-bearing years. So, my question is this, would I be prepared to father a child knowing that there was a 50% chance that he or she would die no later than in their mid-fifties in a most horrifying fashion? I honestly think that I would prefer to adopt. I really don’t think the bloodline is that important.