Do Superheroes Walk Among Us? Research Hints Existence Of Individuals With Possible Superhuman Abilities

What do you think about having the X-Men around, unnoticed? Like any other typical Joe, they are just walking around probably enjoying or dreading long days ahead.

While superheroes like the X-Men may be a bit of a stretch, it has been reported that results from a study called The Resilience Project just came in, and it showed 13 "resilient" people out of half a million, who have genetic mutations that should have killed them in their childhood, but insteead lived healthy lives as adults.

The study, published in Nature Biotechnology, is just the first step of the Resilience Project. For this part of their research, scientists used genomic data collected from other studies, and most of the genomes -- or around 400,000 of them, came from those who sent their spit in the sequencing company 23andMe and agreed to have their DNA used for research.

Unfortunately, the study is non-conclusive, as the scientists didn't have names, complete medical records, or contact information of their subjects. Although they built a program to analyze genomic data and find people with mutations for 584 severe genetic disorders, the program was sent to partner establishments that help them analyze data.

Due to the limits of the study, however, The Resilience Project cannot verify the medical information that they have, nor can they resequence DNA.

So what is the importance of this research? Eric Topol, MD of the Scripps Translational Science Institute said on Science Daily that most genomic research have been focused on diseases, but this one proves that health and resilience -- the opposite of disease -- is needed to understand how the human body reacts and protects in the presence of pathogenic sequence variants.