Genetics

Have you heard of the blue people that lived in the hills of Kentucky? No, I'm not talking about the blue man group. This Kentucky based family is a bit different.

The Fugate family lived in Kentucky and a few members of the family were born with a light blue tint to their skin and nails.  Today the disorder is called Methemoglobinemia; which basically means people with this disorder have a higher amount than usual of methemoglobin in their blood. This is a hereditary genetic condition; which is why we learned about it in our genetics lecture.  The wife was a carrier of this recessive gene and her and her husband had some children that ended up having Methemoglobinemia (thus were blue). Later, the wife married her son and popped out some more blue children.  Basically there was a bunch of inbreeding and a bunch of blue people. Contradictory, to what we know about inbreeding, nobody in the family died because of this disorder.