People from the Fugat family, who settled in the Troublesome Creek highlands of Kentucky two centuries ago, are still being observed by scientists.
This family was known as the "Blue Fugates" or "Blue Fugates" (Blue Fugates) and so they were nicknamed for their unique skin color, which was indeed a light blue hue.
The founders of the blue family, Martin Fugat and his wife Elizabeth Smith, were both carriers of the rare recessive gene Met-H, which is why they had a condition called Methemoglobinemia.
Hemoglobin is an iron-containing protein in the blood with iron 2+ oxidation, which reacts with oxygen and helps transport it to the organs of the body. Hemoglobin is also responsible for the red color of the blood.
Methemoglobin is a special form of hemoglobin, when the iron in it is oxidized to 3+ and in this form hemoglobin can no longer carry oxygen.
In normal people, methemoglobin in the blood occurs by chance and there is no more than 1-2% of it. But in people with methemoglobinemia, the level of methemoglobin is much higher and ranges from 20 to 50%. Therefore, their blood has various unnatural bluish-brown shades, since the percentage of hemoglobin in it is lower. And light skin turns bluish.
Due to this anomaly, the Fugats probably had various health problems, but they lived and reproduced quite normally, despite this ailment. Moreover, Martin and Elizabeth lived 85-90 years impressive even for healthy people.
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Martin and his wife Elizabeth inherited a rare recessive gene from relatives whom researchers could trace back to the early 18th century, and this gene would probably have disappeared on their grandchildren. However, the Fugats' children managed to find themselves husbands and wives in the neighboring "clan" where their distant male relatives lived and received a new portion of the blue gene from there.
Thus, the Fugats' grandchildren were also partially born with blue skin. Years later, these grandchildren were looking for brides and grooms in the same area and then passed on the recessive gene to their children.
Family tree of blue Fugates.
Not all children and grandchildren of Fugats received a recessive gene, but it was present in all generations and was invariably inherited.
Local doctors paid attention to an unusual family with blue skin only in the twentieth century. Hematologist Madison Kauin conducted a study of their blood, and was also the first to build a family tree of the Fugates, to find out where they came from and how far their rare gene had spread. In 1964, he published his article on Fugates in the medical journal Archives of Internal Medicine.
One of the blue Fugates (left) in the middle of the 20th century.
Meanwhile, the Fugates began to disperse from Kentucky to other states and it became much more difficult to track their gene pool. Nowadays, when faced with patients with methemoglobinemia, American doctors often ask them if they are relatives of Fugates, and more often it turns out that this is the case.
The last known direct descendant of Martin Fugat is Benjamin Stacy, born in 1975. In his youth, he had a distinctly blue skin color, but with age he became more and more like an ordinary person.
Benjamin Stacy (left) with his wife and his parents (right).