Ricki Lewis | Jul 23, 2000 | 5 min read
Elusive "Pingelapese Blindness" Gene Identified Before there was Survivor, the hit summer TV show, there was Pingelapese blindness, a classic example of a population bottleneck. In 1775, a typhoon devastated Pengelap, a coral atoll in the Eastern Caroline Islands in Micronesia. Of the 20 survivors, one male passed along a recessive gene for achromatopsia, and four generations later, the condition began to appear, thanks to two centuries of isolation and inevitable inbreeding. In the condition,