In 2010, Sonia Vallabh watched her mom, Kamni Vallabh, die in a really horrible way.
First, her mom’s memory started to go, then she lost the ability to reason. Sonia says it was like watching someone get unplugged from the world. By the end, it was as if she was stuck between being awake and asleep. She was confused and uncomfortable all the time.
“Even when awake, was she fully or was she really? And when asleep, was she really asleep?” says Sonia.
The smart, warm, artistic Kamni – just 51 years old — was disappearing into profound dementia.
“I think until you’ve seen it, it’s hard to actually imagine what it is for a person to be alive and their body is moving around, but their brain is not there anymore,” says Eric Minikel, Sonia’s husband.
In less than a year, Sonia’s mom died.
An autopsy showed Kamni had died from something rare — a prion disease. Specifically, one called fatal familial insomnia because in some patients it steals the ability to fall asleep.
Basically, certain molecules had started clumping together in Kamni’s brain, killing her brain cells. It was all because of one tiny error in her DNA — an “A” where there was supposed to be a “G,” a single typo in a manuscript of 6 billion letters.
Sonia sent a sample of her own blood to a lab, where a test confirmed she inherited the same mutation. The finding threw the family into grief all over again.
Today, Sonia and her husband live and work in Cambridge, Mass., where they are both doctoral students in the lab of Stuart Schreiber, a Harvard professor of chemistry and chemical biology. Over the past several years, the couple has completely redirected their careers and their lives toward this single goal: to prevent prion disease from ever making Sonia sick.
Ancient Roman prostitutes did something similar, but usually they would have phalluses inscribed in their sandals. So, if you were ever in the mood, you could just look down and follow the dicks.
my grandparents have to lock their car doors when they go to sunday mass because people have been breaking in to unlocked cars and leaving entire piles of zucchini
i feel like i should’ve added more context when i posted this. my grandparents live in a rural area where farmers and casual gardeners alike are, at this point in the year, suddenly being hit with unexpectedly abundant zucchini crops. there aren’t just some random vandals leaving zucchinis in people’s cars for the hell of it, this is the work of some very exasperated, probably very elderly, folks who have more zucchini than they know what to do with
Yep. You can also expect to find a bag of zucchini on your porch.
My grandfather once found his neighbor stealing his tomatoes out of his garden at three in the morning. Red-handed, with a basket of the nearly-ripened ones. He thought he was going to find gophers or something, but no, here’s Henry, taking his tomatoes. The best ones.
There was a long pause between them.
My grandfather (allegedly) said, “Henry… it’s OK. You can take some tomatoes if you want them.”
Henry sighed in relief.
“But,” my grandfather said, “you have to take two zucchini for every tomato.”
There was another long silence. “That’s a harsh bargain, John,” said Henry. “But I accept. I’ll tell Joe up the street, too.”
My grandfather said, “Tell Joe he needs to take three.”
a friend of my dad’s came by in the middle of the night, he seemed very nervous when my dad answered the door. he wouldn’t come inside but he leaned in and whispered to my dad in spanish, “i have some fresh grapes for you.” and then this happened:
