"Family history remains one of the most important predictors of an event for an individual, " says Donna Arnett, a genetic epidemiologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and president-elect of the American Heart Association.

WSJ: Seeking Clues to Heart Risk in a Patient's Family Tree

In 1996 David Bedwell, a microbiologist at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, found that an antibiotic, gentamicin, could make the body's gene-reading software skip past the misplaced period in the gene sentence and keep on reading.

FORBES: Stopping the Nonsense