When Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast in August 2005, the Category 5 storm caused such severe and lingering damage because it encountered the perfect combination of vulnerabilities: weak infrastructure, poor lines of communication, and a dysfunctional emergency rescue system. These conditions coalesced to produce one of the worst human catastrophes in recent US history. In a similar way, complex diseases result from a series of events that may not amount to much when considered one by one, but together, coalesce into a perfect storm that spells disaster for a particular organ or system.
1 He and his colleagues had managed to express a variant of a Crohn’s susceptibility gene, known as ATG16L1, in mice. This gene had initially been identified in a subset of human patients. Like human carriers, mice bearing this variant display abnormalities in a group of cells that line the small intestine and are ...
