What I Didn’t Know About Different Colored Eyes

Posted on | June 4, 2007 | Comments Off on What I Didn’t Know About Different Colored Eyes

So I opened the Sports section of The New York Times one day last week, and in the bottom right corner was an article titled “Detour on the Scott Boras Express.” Scott Boras is deemed the “most powerful agent in baseball,” but what caught my eye wasn’t the text but the accompanying photo of one of Mr. Boras’s clients, Max Scherzer, a pitcher drafted by the Arizona Diamondbacks in June 2006.

What drew me to the photo was the fact that Max’s right eye is a bright blue and his left eye a warm brown. So what? Well, I’ve been in medicine for nearly 40 years, but somehow the fact that individuals can be born with different colored eyes has escaped me … which brought me back to a subject I’ve commented on frequently: the need for caring professionals to embrace with comfort the ability to admit “I don’t know” to patients, and the need to replace scientific hyperbole with scientific humility (as in “This is our best knowledge and opinion at this time. But the facts may change as we learn more in the future.”).

The brown and blue eye also made me recall a session I moderated at the Massachusetts Medical Society Annual Meeting two weeks ago. One of the panelists was Alan Guttmacher, a colleague of Francis Collins’s at the National Human Genome Research Institute. I mentioned that some years back I had moderated a panel including Craig Ventor in which he had stated that he believed “we currently know less than 1% of what we needed to know in this field.” Alan’s reaction? “Craig has that about right.”

So here’s the challenge in an age of health consumerism and health consumer empowerment driving transformation of our care systems: How best do we manage our incomplete knowledge (whether the result of discoveries still to come or a lack of translation (as in the case of my somehow missing that people can be born with different colored eyes)? Part of the answer lies in better connectivity and point-of-service personalized research. For example, I went to Google, typed in “different color eyes,” and got a Medline reference but also a Wikipedia one. It said:

“Heterochromia (also known as a heterochromia iridis or heterochromia iridium) is an ocular condition in which one iris is a different color from the other iris (complete heterochromia), or where the part of one iris is a different color from the remainder (partial heterochromia or sectoral heterochromia). It is a result of the relative excess or lack of pigment within an iris or part of an iris, which may be inherited or acquired by disease or injury. This uncommon condition usually results due to uneven melanin content. A number of causes are responsible, including genetics such as chimerism and Waardenburg syndrome. Trauma and certain medications, such as latanoprost can also cause increased or decreased pigmentation in one eye. On occasion the condition of having two different colored eyes is caused by blood staining the iris after sustaining injury.”

Actress Kate Bosworth has one blue eye and one hazel eye. Lead singer Tim Mcllrath of Rise Against has one brown eye and one blue eye. Actress Jane Seymour has one brown eye and one green eye. Yet, contrary to popular belief, David Bowie does not have heterochromia. When he was young, Bowie was punched in the left eye by a classmate wearing a ring. This injury caused the pupil of his eye to remain dilated, commonly being mistaken for a differing iris color.

So there you are. Step one: Knowledge at our finger tips. Step two: Sharing. Step three: Using. Step four: Continuous learning. Step five: Planning ahead.

These are exciting times, don’t you think?