In 1994, at age 27, Keira Berman became acutely ill with what she thought was the flu. She also had blood in her stool, an issue she had dealt with since childhood and assumed to be a reaction to certain foods. Berman’s physician sent her to a gastroenterologist, who detected thousands of polyps in her colon via colonoscopy. Neither her gastroenterologist nor his pathologist knew what the polyps were, so they sent slides to several universities, Berman recalls. Johns Hopkins University responded that, based on her age and the number of polyps in her colon, the New Jersey resident likely had a relatively rare hereditary syndrome known as familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP). The impact of the diagnosis was dramatic. Informed that the polyps in her colon would likely become cancerous soon, Berman underwent a total colectomy and ileoanal anastomosis surgery to construct a J pouch for waste elimination. In the years that followed, FAP affected almost every aspect of her life, from the foo...