A Crack In Creation: A Nobel Prize Winner's Insight into the Future of Genetic Engineering

by Jennifer A. Doudna

2004, a team of physicians from Berlin published a remarkable study describing a boy who was extraordinarily muscular at birth, with bulging thigh and upper-arm muscles. The child continued to develop abnormally pronounced muscles through age four and could perform incredible feats of strength, like extending his arms while holding a three-kilogram dumbbell in each hand. Given his condition’s resemblance to the double muscling in cows and mice, and given the history of unusual strength in his family, the physicians suspected that genetics could explain his physique. After some molecular detective work, they found that both copies of his myostatin gene contained knockout mutations and that his mother, a former professional athlete, was a heterozygote with just one mutated gene. Although the prevalence of muscle hypertrophy—as doctors call the double-muscling condition—is extremely rare in humans, at least one other case has since been reported, this one in a Michigan family.