For three years, 25-year-old Eddie Janicki had felt content working as a civil engineer on a skyscraper-construction project in downtown Seattle. Then he met with the company’s financial advisor. The advisor told him if he continued down the same path, he could retire around age 60. Eddie thought, “That’s great,” but later remembered that his grandmother had experienced her first symptoms of Huntington’s Disease at age 60. An inherited disease, Huntington’s causes a progressive breakdown of nerve cells in the brain, resulting in physical and mental deterioration. Eddie knew his mother had a 50 percent chance of inheriting it, and if she got it, Eddie would have a 50 percent chance of getting it.
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