3 Sept 2015

by Mayim Bialik at 3:33 PM ET

I attended UCLA in the late 1990s. In those days, one of the quintessential UCLA experiences was walking down the main drag of campus called Bruin walk. Bruin walk was full of tables lining both sides of the broad walkway, advertising social and religious clubs and organizations, fraternity and sorority recruitment opportunities, and a variety of community events on and off campus.

Once a year, the Jewish Students Union group would set up shop at a table on Bruin walk and advertise for genetic screening. Sexy, huh? Yeah, I know.

What the students were publicizing was the free screening process for Jewish people in order for them to see if they were carriers for conditions, syndromes, and diseases that are prominent in the Jewish genome, particularly the Central and Eastern European population of Jews known as Ashkenazi Jews.

You see, Jews have for thousands of years emphasized marrying each other, and that fact, combined with the population bottleneck that occurred several hundred years ago, has made for a genetic brew that has genes that congregate more frequently than in the normal population. (FYI, this is one reason being Jewish isn’t “just” a religion; this makes it an ethnic line.)

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