Medicine is getting to grips with individuality

NEENA NIZAR is 42 years old, a professor of business studies and just 122cm tall. The ends of her bones are soft and pliable: on an x-ray they look frayed, like old paintbrushes. During her childhood and adolescence in Dubai she was operated on 30 times. The source of her problem remained a mystery. In 2010, after three decades of wondering, she finally received a diagnosis: Jansen’s Metaphyseal Chondrodysplasia, a condition first recognised in the 1930s. Her problems stem from a broken copy of just one of her 20,000 genes.