Professor Sykes discusses DNA mutation and diseases

Student:
Can you tell if the past mothers and fathers of your relations have got diseases, or something like that?

Professor:
You can certainly look at DNA and see whether you can trace a mutation that will give rise to a particular disease in someone that's living. And in fact there have been attempts to try and see whether famous people from the past have actually had a disease.

And the most famous one that I can think of, although it didn't actually work out, was President Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln. And there was a question mark over whether President Lincoln had a disease called Marfans disease. Marfans disease is where one of the features is people are very tall, they have very long spidery fingers but it's also quite a dangerous disease because your aorta, the main blood vessel that goes through the heart, the big artery in the body, can actually rupture unexpectedly. So people know the mutation, the gene that causes the Marfan Syndrome, Marfan's Disease.

So the answer to your question is that certainly people are alive and who's DNA is available, if you know what gene has a mutation in it, you can do that and medical genetics, clinics, certainly in the UK and other places do that as part of their job really, trying to find mutations and then advising parents on what this means. But it can be done, there's no reason why it can't be done from people who are no longer with us who've died and who's bones remain, as long as you can get the DNA out, which often you can so it's a very good question.