Alison

HIGH SCHOOL

Alison was a strapping teenage girl with bad skin who sang tenor in the
jazz choir. She stomped through the music building with an odd,
forward-leaning swagger---as through she had a 10 lb. weight suspended
from her solar plexis.

She was a diabetic, perpetually swilling back a 40 oz. "Big Gulp" of
diet coke in a vain attempt to quench the thirst of that single mutated
chromosome.

Every time I hear about the human genome project, I think of Alison.
They'll eventually swap-out that "adult-onset diabetes" gene, but how
will they ever deliver the next young Alison from the curse of that
Frankenstein walk?