The lawyer who became a scientist to find a cure for her fatal disease

When Sonia Vallabh found out she was likely to develop a terminal brain condition, she and her husband, Eric Minikel, changed careers to find a cure

In 2011, 27-year-old Harvard graduate Sonia Vallabh got the worst news possible: she was carrying a genetic mutation that would almost certainly lead to a rare and fatal brain disease called fatal familial insomnia. The same genetic error - a single wrong letter of DNA in her "prion" gene - had caused the death of her mother the year before. But rather than despairing, she and her husband, Eric Minikel, ditched their successful careers in law and engineering and set out on a quest to find a cure. Seven years on, they have developed a treatment that they hope will slow or even prevent the onset of the devastating illness.