Turning the tables: I have the person to teach me the ethical thing to do: My own son.

Recently I spoke in this space about the ethics of my oldest son.

When he was 11 years old, I remarked to him, that - this was decidedly not true of his younger brother - that I was proud of the fact that he had never lied to me. (Parents almost always know when their kids lie to them.)

His response was: "Look Dad! There goes a dragon!"

The kid was a brat.

No, not really, well maybe, but an ethical brat all the same.

Something is really troubling me, an ethical problem of a type I never expected to face.

Because of my scientific knowledge, in particular with respect to genomics, proteomics, and human disease, I have recently understood, by inference and a description of a set of profound symptoms that someone close to our family faces a very serious genetic disease; I'm not sure she knows how serious.

I do though. I looked it up. I found out. It scares the shit out of me, frankly. I'm not sure if it were me that I would want to know.

She's a lovely young person, funny and very bright; I like her a lot. We are becoming closer, and I am aware of certain challenges - not directly related to her illness - she faces in her important work in energy science.

As of now, there is no treatment for this syndrome, although advances in molecular biology suggest that at sometime in the future there might be. I actually worked peripherally on a treatment for a very similar related syndrome. (It turns out that one of my neighbors has this disease; she is being evaluated for a clinical trial. It must be very early phase.) The syndrome leads to a shortened and increasingly disabled life.

I'm not a doctor, not qualified to be one or to give medical advice, but I do know things nonetheless.

I have not known what to say, if I can or should say anything.

In talking to my wife, I learned that my oldest son, he of the high ethics and the lie about the dragon, is aware of the symptomology of the individual in question, to whom he is closer than I am.

I have someone who can advise me; the teacher I taught.

I'm a lucky guy. I haven't slept well since I learned what was going on, and now at last, I have a shoulder on which I can cry and lean, who can understand and advise me of what to do, if anything.

It's a very big weight, and I have someone to help me lift it. I'll talk to him; he'll be able to help me to know what I should say or do if anything at all.