04-16-2010, 05:10 PM
mattkime wrote:
>>Am I the only one thinking she is pretty selfish?
nope!
Give the woman a break!
It's not fair to judge her behavior of 20 years ago based on today's diagnostic sophistication.
Chances are that the exact genetic nature of the problem was not immediately apparent -- she's perfectly healthy herself, after all. The first death would have been attributed to an isolated chance event, and it may have taken several births to figure out what was really going on -- depends on where she lived and the medical care available there.
It sounds like she had a mitochondrial abnormality that was pretty much confined to her germ line cells, an unusual situation. Besides, the predictability for somatic and cytoplasmic inheritance is very different from the predictability of chromosomal inheritance.