Kim, meanwhile, disappeared down to Baja in Mexico. Gavrilova’s scepticism had worn her down and she fully expected that the results would come back negative.

When she returned home in May, there was a letter waiting for her. It was from Gavrilova. She had been trying to call for months. The test had come back positive: on one of her two copies of LMNA Goodsell had a mutation, in a part of the gene that almost never changes. LMNA consists of 57,517 DNA ‘letters’, and in the vast majority of people (and most chimps, monkeys, mice and fish) the 1,044th position is filled by a G (guanine). Kim had a T (thymine). “All evidence suggests that the mutation found in this patient might be disease-causing,” Gavrilova wrote in her report.

In other words, Kim was right.

“I’m beyond impressed,” says Michael Ackerman, a geneticist at the Mayo Clinic. He specialises in inherited heart disorders like ARVC that can cause sudden death at any time. Such diseases tend to encourage people to do their homework, but Ackerman describes most as “Google-and-go” patients who check their diagnosis online, or read up about treatment options. Kim had written up her research as a white paper – 36 pages of research and analysis. “Kim’s the only one who handed me her own thesis,” he says. “Of all the 1,000-plus patients I’ve taken care of, none have done extensive detective work and told physicians which genetic test to order.”

He thinks she nailed it too. It is unlikely to be the whole story – Kim almost certainly has other mutations that are affecting the course of her disease – but LMNA “is certainly the leading contender for a unifying explanation, without there being a close second,” he says. “The evidence is pretty good for this being a smoking gun.”

The test had vindicated her hypothesis, but it also raised some confusing questions. Heart problems are a common feature of laminopathies, but those mutations had never been linked to ARVC, Kim’s specific heart malfunction. Had she been misdiagnosed? A few months later, Kim stumbled across a new paper by a team of British researchers who had studied 108 people with ARVC and found that four had LMNA mutations (and none of the standard ones). “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of ARVC caused by mutations in LMNA,” they wrote. They didn’t know about Kim’s work – they couldn’t have, of course. But she knew. Kim had beaten them to it. “I was so excited, I was running up and down the beach,” she says.

Amateur detectives



When patients get solutions to their own genetic puzzle, it’s always professional geneticists who do the solving. Take James Lupski. He has been studying Charcot–Marie–Tooth for decades, and discovered the first gene linked to the condition. He also has it himself. In 2010 he sequenced his own genome and discovered a previously unidentified mutation responsible for the disease. In other cases anxious parents have been instrumental in uncovering the causes of their kids’ mysterious genetic disorders after long diagnostic odysseys, but only by bringing their cases in front of the right scientists.

Kim, however, was an amateur. And to her, sequencing was not a Hail Mary pass that would – maybe, somehow – offer her answers; it was a way of confirming a carefully researched hypothesis.

“People have been talking about empowering consumers since there was an internet,” says Eric Topol, a geneticist at the Scripps Clinic. “But finally, we’ve reached a point where someone can delve into their condition beyond what the top physicians at the Mayo Clinic could. They couldn’t connect the dots. She did.”