The KE family is a medical name designated for a
British
British may refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies.
** Britishness, the British identity and common culture
* British English, ...
family, about half of whom exhibit a severe
speech disorder
Speech disorders or speech impairments are a type of communication disorder in which normal speech is disrupted. This can mean stuttering, lisps, etc. Someone who is unable to speak due to a speech disorder is considered mute. Speech skills ar ...
called
developmental verbal dyspraxia
Development of the human body is the process of growth to maturity. The process begins with fertilization, where an egg released from the ovary of a female is penetrated by a sperm cell from a male. The resulting zygote develops through mitos ...
.
It is the first family with speech disorder to be investigated using
genetic analyses, by which the speech impairment is discovered to be due to
genetic mutation
In biology, a mutation is an alteration in the nucleic acid sequence of the genome of an organism, virus, or extrachromosomal DNA. Viral genomes contain either DNA or RNA. Mutations result from errors during DNA or viral replication, ...
, and from which the gene ''
FOXP2
Forkhead box protein P2 (FOXP2) is a protein that, in humans, is encoded by the ''FOXP2'' gene. FOXP2 is a member of the forkhead box family of transcription factors, proteins that regulate gene expression by binding to DNA. It is expressed in ...
'', often dubbed the "language gene", was discovered. Their condition is also the first human speech and language disorder known to exhibit strict
Mendelian inheritance
Mendelian inheritance (also known as Mendelism) is a type of biological inheritance following the principles originally proposed by Gregor Mendel in 1865 and 1866, re-discovered in 1900 by Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns, and later popularize ...
.
Brought to medical attention from their school children in the late 1980s, the case of KE family was taken up at the
UCL Institute of Child Health
The UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health (ICH) is an academic department of the Faculty of Population Health Sciences of University College London (UCL) and is located in London, United Kingdom. It was founded in 1946 and together ...
in
London
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
in 1990. Initial report suggested that the family was affected by a
genetic disorder
A genetic disorder is a health problem caused by one or more abnormalities in the genome. It can be caused by a mutation in a single gene (monogenic) or multiple genes (polygenic) or by a chromosomal abnormality. Although polygenic disorders ...
. Canadian
linguist
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
Myrna Gopnik
Myrna Lee Gopnik (born 1935) is a Canadian linguist. She is a Professor Emerita of Linguistics at McGill University. She is known for her research on the KE family, an English family with several members affected by specific language impairment.
...
suggested that the disorder was characterized primarily by grammatical deficiency, supporting the controversial notion of a "grammar gene".
Geneticists
A geneticist is a biologist or physician who studies genetics, the science of genes, heredity, and variation of organisms. A geneticist can be employed as a scientist or a lecturer. Geneticists may perform general research on genetic processe ...
at the
University of Oxford
, mottoeng = The Lord is my light
, established =
, endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019)
, budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20)
, chancellor ...
determined that the condition was indeed genetic, with complex physical and physiological effects, and in 1998, they identified the actual gene, eventually named ''
FOXP2
Forkhead box protein P2 (FOXP2) is a protein that, in humans, is encoded by the ''FOXP2'' gene. FOXP2 is a member of the forkhead box family of transcription factors, proteins that regulate gene expression by binding to DNA. It is expressed in ...
''. Contrary to the grammar gene notion, ''FOXP2'' does not control any specific grammar or language output. This discovery directly led to a broader knowledge on
human evolution
Human evolution is the evolutionary process within the history of primates that led to the emergence of ''Homo sapiens'' as a distinct species of the hominid family, which includes the great apes. This process involved the gradual development of ...
as the gene is directly implicated with the
origin of language.
Two family members, a boy and a girl, were featured in the
National Geographic
''National Geographic'' (formerly the ''National Geographic Magazine'', sometimes branded as NAT GEO) is a popular American monthly magazine published by National Geographic Partners. Known for its photojournalism, it is one of the most widely ...
documentary film
A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional film, motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a Recorded history, historical record". Bill Nichols (film critic), Bil ...
''
Human Ape
''Human Ape'' is a 2008 National Geographic documentary film on the genetic and evolutionary origins of human behavior, and covers the genetic and behavioural similarities and differences between humans and other great apes. The award-winning ind ...
''.
Background and identity
The individual identity of the KE family are kept confidential. The family children attended Elizabeth Augur's special educational needs unit at the Lionel Primary School in
Brentford
Brentford is a suburban town in West London, England and part of the London Borough of Hounslow. It lies at the confluence of the River Brent and the Thames, west of Charing Cross.
Its economy has diverse company headquarters buildings whi ...
, West London. Towards the end of 1980s, seven children of the family attended there.
Augur began to learn that the family had a speech disorder for three generations. Of the 30 members, half of them had severe disability, some are affected mildly, and few are unaffected. Their faces show rigidity at the lower half, and most cannot complete pronouncing a word. Many of them have severe stuttering and with limited vocabulary. In particular, they have difficulty with consonants, and omit them, such as "boon" for "spoon", "able" for "table", and "bu" for "blue". Linguistic deficiency is also noted in written language both in reading and writing. They are characterized by lower nonverbal
IQ.
Ethnicity
When the first study on KE family was published in 1990, the exact identity of the family was withheld and simply indicated as living in West London.
The first genetic study reported in 1995 revealed that they were 30 members of four generations, with the designation "KE family."
In 2009, American psychologist
Elena L. Grigorenko of
Yale University
Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...
wrote a review paper on the genetics of
developmental disorders in which she specifically described a case of speech disorder in a "three-generation pedigree of Pakistani origin from the United Kingdom (referred to as KE)." When a team of researchers from Germany, led by Arndt Wilcke of the
Leipzig University
Leipzig University (german: Universität Leipzig), in Leipzig in Saxony, Germany, is one of the world's oldest universities and the second-oldest university (by consecutive years of existence) in Germany. The university was founded on 2 December ...
, reported in 2011 the effects of ''FOXP2'' mutation in the brain, they mentioned the family as "a large Pakistani family with severe speech and language disorder."
The British-Pakistani description for the family became widely used. However, British geneticist and neuroscientist
Simon E. Fisher at the
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (German: ''Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik''; Dutch: ''Max Planck Instituut voor Psycholinguïstiek'') is a research institute situated on the campus of Radboud University Nijmegen located ...
pointed out the error in Wilcke's paper to which the German team published a corrigendum that KE family were not of Pakistani descent, but "a large English Caucasian family."
Research investigations
Augur convinced the family to undergo medical examinations and approached geneticist Michael Baraitser at the Institute of Child Health. With colleagues Marcus Prembey and Jane Hurst at the Hospital for Sick Children (
Great Ormond Street Hospital
Great Ormond Street Hospital (informally GOSH or Great Ormond Street, formerly the Hospital for Sick Children) is a children's hospital located in the Bloomsbury area of the London Borough of Camden, and a part of Great Ormond Street Hospit ...
), they started taking blood samples for analyses in 1987. Their first report in 1990 shows that 16 family members were affected by severe abnormality, characterised by difficulty to speak effectively, understand complex sentences, unable to learn sign language, and that the condition was genetically inherited (
autosomal dominant
In genetics, dominance is the phenomenon of one variant (allele) of a gene on a chromosome masking or overriding the effect of a different variant of the same gene on the other copy of the chromosome. The first variant is termed dominant and t ...
). Their conclusion runs:
Of the 16 affected children, none had significant feeding difficulties as infants and there were few neonatal problems. Hearing and intelligence of all affected members were within the normal range. The speech problem in this family has been classified as developmental verbal dyspraxia
Development of the human body is the process of growth to maturity. The process begins with fertilization, where an egg released from the ovary of a female is penetrated by a sperm cell from a male. The resulting zygote develops through mitos ...
.
Upon the news,
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...
was preparing a documentary of the case in the scientific serial ''Antenna''. By this time, a Canadian linguist from
, was visiting her son in Oxford, and delivered an invited lecture at the university, where she noticed the flyer for the BBC programme. She contacted the medical geneticists, interviewed KE family members, and returned to
. She was convinced that the genetic defect was largely centred on grammatical ability, and wrote letters to
in 1990. Her reports promulgated a notion of "grammar gene" and a controversial concept of grammar-specific disorder.
linguists. In 1995 they found, contrary to Gopnik's hypothesis, from comparison of 13 affected and 8 normal individuals that the genetic disorder was a complex impairment of not only linguistic ability, but also intellectual and anatomical features, thereby disproving the "grammar gene" notion.
(MRI), they found that some brain regions were underactive (compared to baseline levels) in the KE family members and that some were overactive, when compared to normal people. The underactive regions included
that control face and mouth regions. The areas that were overactive includes
, the speech centre. With Oxford geneticists
(7q31) in 1998. The chromosomal region (
) was named ''SPCH1'' (for speech-and-language-disorder-1), and it contains 70 genes. Using the known gene location of speech disorder from a boy, designated CS, of unrelated family, they discovered in 2001 that the main gene responsible for speech impairment in both KE family and CS was ''FOXP2'', and that this gene plays a major role in the origin and development of language. Mutations in the genes result in speech and language problems.