I'm Elise Hugh with today's TED Talks Daily.

Laura Dirkovich is an anthropologist, and early into her first pregnancy, she learned a bombshell

about her own biology. But she didn't worry too much. Why? Because she understood her own genetic

history, she was able to make better decisions about her

personal health. Check out how taking an evolutionary perspective could help us all understand the

intricacies of human health in this talk from TEDx Tufts in 2019.

When I was approximately nine weeks pregnant with my first child, I found out I'm a carrier

for a fatal genetic disorder called TASX disease.

What this means is that one of the two copies of chromosome number 15 that I have in each

of my cells has a genetic mutation.

Because I still have one normal copy of this gene, the mutation doesn't affect me.

But if a baby inherits this mutation from both parents, if both copies of this particular gene don't function properly, it results in Tasex, an incurable disease that progressively

shuts down the central nervous system and causes death by age five. For many pregnant women,

this news might produce a full-on panic. But I knew something that helped keep me calm when I

heard this bombshell about my own biology.

I knew that my husband, whose ancestry isn't Eastern European Jewish like mine,

had a very low likelihood of also being a carrier for the TASX mutation.

While the frequency of heterozygotes, individuals who have one normal copy of the gene and one mutated

copy, is about one out of 27 people among Jews of Ashkenazi descent, like me, in most populations,

only one in about 300 people carry the Tasex mutation.

Thankfully, it turned out I was right not to worry too much.

My husband isn't a carrier, and we now have two beautiful and healthy children.

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