Is there a gene for every disease?
If you put five people in the same room, the chance of any two of those five having the same name is pretty low. However, let’s make that 150 people. You just might find yourself with three Graces and a handful of Davids. Now, think about how many genes we have in our bodies. In case you’re curious, that count is between 20,000 and 25,000 [source: U.S. National Library of Medicine]. That’s a lot of genes, which means there are a lot of opportunities to see the same thing crop up repeatedly — like mistakes. Things go wrong frequently with our genes, and when they do, it’s called a mutation. Mutations change our genetic code. Our genes hold the directions for making the proteins in our body, and without the right ones, much-needed proteins can’t be made. Therefore, a mutation that messes up the directions for an important protein can lead to health issues. Most of the time
