As a medical student at Catholic University in Rome, Enza Maria Valente remembers helping her genetics professor, a priest in his sixties, as he struggled to calculate probabilities for passing on a genetic disorder. "I would just pick up the answer even before he finished the calculations," she says.
Despite her pedigree predilection, Valente didn't enter the field - not yet anyway. Hailing from a family of physicians, her mother, a pediatrician, strongly encouraged Valente to take over the family practice. She resisted, pursuing neurophysiology instead. But, she says she got bored just seeing patients, save the occasional unusual phenotype.
She started working on movement disorders with a group at her university. When they needed someone to go to University College London (UCL) to study a collection of Italian families that carried genes for dystonia, Valente jumped at the chance. With encouragement from her London colleagues, Valente decided to work ...
