In comic books, superheroes can fly or read minds, but for most of us, not getting sick would be pretty heroic.
On April 11, researchers published published (paywall) work in Nature Biotechnology that identified 13 people out of a sample of close to 600,000 whose genetic information indicated that they should be severely ill with one of eight devastating conditions, including cystic fibrosis and the bone disorder atelosteogenesis, but whose medical records indicated that they were perfectly healthy. If this is the case, researchers could study why they are well—perhaps through other, unidentified mutations, environmental factors, or a combination of both—to help those who are sick. The only trouble is, researchers have no way of finding these patients because they didn’t have consent to recontact them.
