One interesting opportunity is in the area of suicide prevention. In the United States, 1.4 percent of all people die from suicide, and 4.6 percent of the population has attempted suicide. Uncle Ray’s colleagues at Johns Hopkins studied the DNA of 2,700 adults with bipolar disorder, 1,201 of whom had attempted suicide. They identified a gene, ACP1, that produces a protein that appears in excessive quantities in the brains of people who had attempted suicide.
