“C’est de la bonne viande”, Emmanuel Mignot, a Paris native, whispered to his dog, Beau, as he presented him with an aromatic can of dog food – much more appealing than his usual diet of dry pellets. Beau happily trotted over to the food, rolled his eyes in pleasurable anticipation, and dropped to the floor – completely still and asleep. (Discover 78) Beau is a dog suffering from narcolepsy. Because Beau became excited by the food, he collapsed to the floor in sleep. As unusual as this may sound, Beau is not alone in this world. Narcolepsy doesn’t affect just animals but humans as well. Between one in 1,000 and one in 2,000 people in the United States have been diagnosed with this potentially dangerous disease. Narcolepsy, a condition in which a person is overcome by periodic bouts of overwhelming sleep, is a biological disorder stemming from a single genetic defect, prompted by environmental factors.
Scientists believe that a mutation in a gene encoding a cell-surface protein,
or receptor that allows nerve cells to respond to proteins called hypocretins are responsible for narcolepsy. (Travis 148) In some cases, the nerve cells that make the hypocretins, which are responsible for stimulating arousal and regulating sleep, are missing or destroyed by an autoimmune attack – when a person’s immune system attacks its own brain tissue believing it is foreign. Yet it is unlikely that this results from heredity since most narcoleptics have no narcoleptic relatives and usually don’t show symptoms until the second or third decades of their life. A study that further supports this is the study of narcolepsy involving identical twins. In 75% of the cases in which one twin had a case of narcolepsy, the other was unaffected. Because of this, it is difficult to believe that genetic factors or heredity is the dominant cause of narcolepsy since genes should be passed down to both twins, as they are identical. In addition, simply having the defective gene doesn’t necessarily
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