After running a battery of tests, the NIH scientists slowly pieced together an explanation for Kim’s serendipitous cure. They concluded that a single cell in her body must have experienced an uncommon and usually catastrophic event called chromothripsis—a recently discovered phenomenon in which a chromosome suddenly shatters and is then repaired, leading to a massive rearrangement of the genes within it. The effects in the body are generally either trivial (if the damaged cell dies immediately) or dire (if the rearranged DNA inadvertently activates cancer-causing genes).
