Word: normal
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...middle of one impossible assignment, Wesley asks Fox, "Have you ever thought of being somebody else - somebody normal?" She ponders for a beat and replies, "No." The same question, and answer, might apply to Jolie. The contours of her face and body are improbable, arresting and unique; she's simply not designed to play ordinary people. We don't doubt her skills as a serious actress, but she's much more seductive and satisfying as a fantasy or cartoon character. Or a saint from some fertility cult: Holy Jolie...
...than of radiation exposure. In 2006 and 2007, her daughter, now 5, had two additional CT scans, 6 months apart, for what doctors initially thought was a growth abnormality. They've since determined the child was perfectly healthy. "All that, just to find out her head is bigger than normal," says the 27-year-old mother of two in Boone, North Carolina. In hindsight, Houck wishes she had done things a bit differently. "I would have asked more questions about the necessity for a third scan so soon after the second." She also says no one mentioned the option...
...vague awareness of our genetic endowment, fretting perhaps over a familial tendency toward heart disease or beaky noses. But families affected by fragile X can discuss their genome with startling specificity. Their key concern is a small strip of DNA on the long arm of the X chromosome. Normally, humans have five to 55 repetitions of the nucleotides CGG (cytosine, guanine, guanine) in this region. But for unknown reasons, the number of CGG repeats can expand beyond normal as the DNA is copied from mother to child...
Cari, for instance, has one normal X chromosome (with 24 repeats), inherited from her mother, and another with an abnormal 85 repeats, inherited from her father, who has 89 repeats. Cari's son Max has 363. Any number greater than 200 causes full-blown fragile X syndrome (so named because, under a microscope, the expanded X chromosome may look bent to the point of breaking). The reason boys are more likely than girls to develop major symptoms is that girls carry a pair of X chromosomes, which means that if one is defective, the other can compensate. Boys, however, carry...
...condition would have to work differently from the ones used to treat fragile X syndrome because the biology of the disease is different too. In fragile X, the key gene is silent; in FXTAS patients, it's too active. "The gene produces up to 10 times more message than normal," explains molecular biologist Paul Hagerman of the University of California at Davis, who together with wife Randi has received an NIH grant to study the disorder. Over time, messenger RNA--the substance that transcribes genes into proteins--accumulates in the nuclei of brain cells, eventually poisoning them...