Author: thegiantgene_1pcqej

Since discovering my own connection to the world of gigantism, I can’t help but notice any stories that I encounter that involve giants. I was watching the television show “Antiques Roadshow” and a woman had brought in a very large pair of slippers to get evaluated. The story was that they once belonged to a woman from her hometown named Ella Ewing. The antique specialist didn’t value the slippers very highly, but they caught my interest. A quick Wikipedia consult and I was able to learn quite a bit about Ella Ewing and how beloved she was in her hometown Gorin, Missouri. Like many giants, few jobs were available to her locally, but she was able to seek her fortune by being displayed as a circus sideshow, including time with the Barnum and Bailey Circus. She was also offered the amazing sum of $5000 to appear for five months at the Epstein Museum. It’s believed that she used the money to help her parents. When she became sick with tuberculosis late in her life, it is hard not to think of Charles Byrne when you read about how concerned she was that someone nefarious would steal her body. When she died, her father placed her coffin in a steel vault and encased it in concrete where it remains to this day in the Harmony Grove Cemetary in Gorin.

July 12, 2022

When I started to develop this website, the first book that came to mind was Siddhartha Mukerjee’s The Gene: An Intimate Story.  This book is not only well written by a Pulitzer Prize winning writer, it also makes science intriguing through Mukerjee’s personal genetic history of familial schizophrenia.  He deftly  uses stories of family members in India with schizophrenia to illustrate how a genetic disease impacts the entire extended family even those who do not have the disease themselves. Families with familial forms of gigantism experience the same thing.

When the gene mutation is low penetrance, meaning not every person that has the mutation develops the disease, it leaves family members wondering why some get the disease but not others. Scientists continue to study this phenomenon in hopes of understanding how and why genetic diseases move so randomly through families.

My favorite quote from his book is:  “An organism is much more than its genes, of course, but to understand an organism, you much first understand its genes.” I hope that by understanding my genetic legacy and the world of gigantism, I can better understand myself as I reach out to find others with the disease that we share.