Royal Blood Problems
Q. Did Queen Victoria really carry the gene for hemophilia and, if so, do any of the other royal houses of Europe carry it today?
A. Some of Queen Victoria's children inherited a defective gene that causes hemophilia, the name for several diseases that limit the ability of the blood to clot properly, and passed the gene on to several descendants. It is not known if she herself inherited such a gene, which appears on an X chromosome, or if it was a spontaneous mutation in her genome.
Victoria's son Prince Leopold had a severe form of the disease and died at 31 after a fall, but not before he passed the gene on to a daughter, whose son had hemophilia. At least two of Victoria's daughters, Princess Alice and Princess Beatrice, were carriers of the disease, bearing one defective copy of the gene. Several of their descendants were also affected, including members of the royal houses of Spain, Prussia and Russia, like Prince Alexei, whom Rasputin tried to treat; Alexei and his sisters died in the revolution.
The hemophiliacs in these families were all men. For a woman to get the disease, both X chromosomes must be affected. The descendants of Victoria who were known to have the disease have all died, several in car crashes, some of them when quite young. The last died in 1945, at 56. Though these families could theoretically have carriers, no new cases have shown up for a few generations. C. CLAIBORNE RAY
Drawing (Drawing by Victoria Roberts)