Linus Pauling: I think, I forgot to mention, I think of course that something ought to be done about
this disease, sickle cell anemia. Here you have fifteen-hundred children born a year
with this disease and doomed to a pretty poor life. And Dr. Zuckerkandl and I made
a proposal.
First Harvey Itano and I developed a very simple test. This drop of blood: one drop
of blood with just a little variant of an existing test. But it’s no job at all, when
blood tests are carried out, required for marriage licenses, say, why not check for
sickling too?
And then, we suggest that every young person have his genotype tattooed on his forehead,
so that young people would recognize at first sight if they were incompatible in this
way. In fact, we said in this paper, and then, you see, they could refrain from marrying
one another because if they marry one another a quarter of their children will inherit
these two genes and will be grossly defected, be grossly ill, will die young, suffer
and die.
But they could marry normal people, and then if they married normal people, half of
their children will have inherited the single gene, would be carriers like one of
the parents. And so they should be encouraged to have a smaller number of children
than normal, to be satisfied with one child. And then in that way, the gene which
is no longer needed, because malaria is controlled by the anti-malarial drugs and
the destruction of mosquito ponds and so on, in that way the gene would be got rid
of. And we said this chance, twenty-five percent chance of giving birth to a defective
child, is too large to allow a combination of ignorance and free enterprise in love
to take care of the matter. I think that’s the way to handle that problem. Just that
the heterozygotes would not marry one another, or not have children.
And there’s a possibility this is being done, of course, for other abnormalities.
There is the possibility that you could take a little, stick a needle in and a get
a little sample of amniotic fluid and look at the cells and see whether the sickle
cell gene is present in the developing embryo and abort it if it is. But this is
a complicated process. Be hard to do with the sickle cell gene, but it is easy to
do with trisomy, with the extra chromosome with mongolism. And of course, it should
be done then, especially with older women who have a higher probability of this non-disjunction
which produces a child with forty-seven chromosomes; should be done with them, especially
one who, if the mother’s already given birth to a mongoloid child.
