Doctor says Acadians' genealogy aids science William Johnson / Louisiana Gannett News Posted on October 13, 2004 There is an old story about a man who lost his wallet. His friend finds him searching for it one night under a street lamp. "Is this where you lost it?" asks the friend. "I don't know where I lost it, but the light is better here," the man replies. That is the situation in which Dr. John P. Doucet, an expert in DNA research, finds himself. In his case, the missing wallet is the secrets to curing a host of hereditary diseases and the light is the clear genetic heritage of Louisiana's Acadian people. Doucet, with the Center for Acadiana Genetics and Hereditary Health Care, brought the story of the Acadians and their contribution to curing diseases to Saturday's meeting of the Imperial St. Landry Genealogical and Historical Society. Acadians are a unique people in that they can all be traced to a group of 300 people who arrived in Nova Scotia in 1607. Until about World War II they lived in relative isolation, rarely marrying outside their own group. The Acadians have one other important thing going for them. As good Catholics, they have a detailed 400-year history of church records listing every marriage and birth. Doucet said, as a group, Acadians are no more prone to disease than anyone else. What makes them special is their documented genealogy. "Genealogy is crucially important in our work. This allows us to learn more about diseases and their cures by following them in specific families," Doucet said. As an example, he used Usher's Syndrome, which causes profound deafness from birth and blindness by the time the person is in their 20s. "This is the first disease for which we have found the cause," Doucet said. The disease is found in South Africa, Lebenon, France and elsewhere, including Louisiana. All the Louisiana cases can be traced back to Acadian families that settled in either Acadia, Vermilion or Lafayette parishes following their expulsion from Canada in 1775. Using the Acadian's detailed genealogies, Doucet's group has traced the Acadian strain of Usher's Syndrome to a single couple who lived in Nova Scotia in the 1600s. He said his group was able to find the error in a single gene that causes the disease in only five years. Without the strong genealogy of Acadians, it might have taken decades. "Acadians are actually helping science make some great discoveries," Doucet said. He said knowing the source of this one genetic defect is shedding light on other causes of blindness and deafness. He said the recently completed Human Genome Project has shown that all people - black, white, Asian or European - are 99.9 percent genetically similar. Therefore, what affects one of us, affects all of us. "We are not spending federal dollars to help 300 families. We are helping four billion people," Doucet said. "We are all incredibly similar." He said he believes the day is not far away when science will be able, through gene therapy, to begin finding cures for everything from cancer to heart disease. •