In the 1960s, Habiba Chaabouni was one of a handful of women enrolled in medical school in Tunisia. There, she often met families with two or three sick children. "There was a lot of chronic disease," she recalls, and she wanted to find out why.
In some ways, Tunisia is a geneticist's paradise. The native population primarily derives from the Arab-Berber ethnic group, which favors frequent consanguineous marriages (still around one-third of unions), resulting in a host of genetic diseases including thalassemia, mental retardation, and birth defects. The country borders Algeria, Libya, and the Mediterranean, and juts out toward Sicily, so it has been infiltrated by a succession of diverse nations: the Phoenicians, Romans, Byzantines, and the French. All of this paints an interesting genetic picture.
It wasn't an easy one to analyze. When Chaabouni graduated from medical school, there was no infrastructure or facilities in Tunisia to study genetic ...
