My Daughter’s DNA

One father’s search for the scientific answers that no one seemed to have.

By Hugh Young Rienhoff Jr.

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1 IN 6 BILLION: Beatrice and father Hugh in his home office, where he searched her DNA for clues to her unique condition.

Photograph by Cody Pickens

If you scrape the inside of your cheek with a popsicle stick and mix it with a few homely salts and a shot of grain alcohol, you’ll see a fluffy cloud of material floating in the glass. It looks like cotton, but it’s really the code of you. DNA is deceptively ordinary-looking.

The human genome — the totality of each person’s genes within their body — is a vast chemical space with ...

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