Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 10, 1991 TAG: 9102100031
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
Dr. Marc Micozzi, director of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, said Saturday that new techniques may make it possible to use 126-year-old specimens in his museum to reconstruct Lincoln's complete genetic pattern.
Such studies, he said, could tell much about Abe's aches, pains and health problems.
"There is a lot of potential social value to learning the answers to these questions," Micozzi said.
While settling the historians' debate about whether Lincoln had Marfan's, he said, the studies could also "provide an inspiring perspective" on what people can accomplish despite serious medical problems.
Marfan's is an inherited condition that can have painful and crippling effects. Its most common symptoms include exceptional height and thinness, along with elongated fingers, arms, toes and legs, and the effects of the condition can range from mild to very serious heart problems.
Patients severely affected die at the average age of 32.
Lincoln, assassinated at age 56, had many of the characteristics of Marfan's, but medical data on him isn't detailed enough to determine if he really inherited the disorder.
"He was tall and gaunt and narrow in the chest," Micozzi said. "From some descriptions, it looks like his legs and arms may have been within the range that you see with Marfan. But having gone over all the evidence, I do not have an opinion to any reasonable degree of medical certainty."
To settle the question, Dr. Darwin Prockop of the Jefferson Institute of Molecular Medicine in Philadelphia, has proposed genetic testing of medical specimens collected during Lincoln's autopsy in 1865.
Micozzi said his museum had eight to 10 bone fragments recovered by Army doctors when they performed a post-mortem after Lincoln was assassinated. The president was mortally wounded with a gunshot to the head as he sat in a box at Ford's Theater in Washington.
The bone fragments, which are only fractional inches in size, bear the beveled marks of penetration by a bullet, Micozzi said. The museum also has strands of hair and clothing stained with Lincoln's blood.
Army doctors who performed the autopsy kept the specimens, and family members turned them over to the museum in the 1950s. Since then, Micozzi said, the specimens have been sealed in air-tight glass containers.
Prockop has developed tests that extract DNA, the molecule that contains the genetic pattern, from very small samples of tissue, bone or hair. Micozzi said if Prockop is successful, Lincoln's entire genetic pattern could be determined and his genes preserved for future studies.
The genetic pattern could bear evidence of Marfan's along with any other disorder Lincoln many have inherited.
The findings, Micozzi said, could enable Lincoln to instruct a whole new generation.
"We live in an era where we are taking a hard look at disease and disability and what it means in people's lives," he said. "There could be a very inspiring message from whether or not Lincoln had these medical conditions and what he overcame and that it did not prevent him from enormous accomplishment."
However, Micozzi said the museum is concerned about how such testing could affect studies of materials from other past presidents.
There are questions of privacy that would have to be settled because there are preserved medical specimens from a number of long-dead presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant and Grover Cleveland, he said.
A committee organized by the National Museum of Health & Medicine Foundation to study Prockop's proposal will meet in May.
by CNB