Sleep: Genes Cause People to React Differently to Lack of Sleep, Says Study <br/><a href=" US News</a> | <a href=" Business News</a> Copy No matter how little they sleep, some people can keep a skip in their step while others will yawn and struggle through the day. A new study from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine found that the reason could be in our genes. Researchers found that healthy people with one particular genetic variant were generally sleepier than those without the gene. One person who has been told by his doctor that he may have this genetic variation is Robert Gibson, a 43-year-old machine shop supervisor in Milan, Illinois. It would not be the only gene-linked sleep condition Gibson experiences; he already suffers from bouts of sleep paralysis, a disorder in which sufferers feel paralyzed as they fall asleep or as they wake up. "It feels like I am drugged down, like there's a heavy weight on me the whole next day," said Gibson. Genes and Heavy-Eyes
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Cracking the Code of Life Cracking the Code of Life PBS Airdate: April 17, 2001 ROBERT KRULWICH: When I look at this—and these are the three billion chemical letters, instructions for a human being—my eyes glaze over. But when scientist Eric Lander looks at this he sees stories. ERIC LANDER (Whitehead Institute/MIT): The genome is a storybook that's been edited for a couple billion years. ROBERT KRULWICH: This is the story of one of the greatest scientific adventures ever, and at the heart of it is a small, very powerful molecule, DNA. For the past ten years, scientists all over the world have been painstakingly trying to read the tiny instructions buried inside our DNA. J. FRANCIS COLLINS (National Human Genome Research Institute): This is the ultimate imaginable thing that one could do scientifically...is to go and look at our own instruction book and then try to figure out what it's telling us. ROBERT KRULWICH: And what it's telling us is so surprising and so strange and so unexpected. I'm Robert Krulwich. DR.