India, Aug. 18 -- Section 2(c) of the Biological Diversity Act protects every living thing in India except Indians. The law that might fix it closes in nine months

Your DNA is written in a chemical alphabet of four letters, three billion of them in a row. In one gene that builds the heart, twenty-five of those letters may be missing. The gap is old, passed from parent to child for thousands of years. Four to eight of every hundred people of South Asian origin carry it - perhaps a hundred million of us. Indian scientists found it, reporting in Nature Genetics in 2009 that carriers were seven times likelier to develop serious heart-muscle disease. For over a decade that was the answer.

In 2020 the answer changed. Researchers looked again,...