PITTSBURGH, Pa. A team of researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School has isolated the gene responsible for synophrys, the phenomenon known as “unibrow,” giving hope to sufferers from the affliction that their children will grow up with two normal eyebrows, rather than a single furry caterpillar crawling across their foreheads.
“I can’t tell you the hurt that unibrow caused me when I was growing up,” says Stanley Klesko of Donora, Pennsylvania. “The kids would chant ‘Stan’s eyebrow is one straight line, That’s why he’s no friend of mine’,” Klesko recalls painfully.
The mapping of the human genome was completed in 2003, and the manipulation of particular genes will become a reality over time. The rush to identify the unibrow gene was propelled forward when Sesame Street’s Bert, who has perhaps the world’s most famous example of the deformity, collapsed after a “skip and wave” show in Pittsburgh due to the weight of his eyebrow hair and the perspiration that it absorbed during the performance.
“We worked round the clock and consumed a lot of pizza and Chinese food,” says Dr. Wang Lee, a professor of biophysics. “Then we fell asleep and a couple of graduate assistants did all the work.”
Couples will now have the option of choosing from a smorgasboard of eyebrow options for their children, ranging from the slender and graceful “Audrey Hepburn” model to the more rugged and masculine “Clark Gable” style.
“It’s all about relieving human suffering,” says Dr. Lee. “Nothing hurts worse than pulling out an eyebrow hair,” he notes, “unless it’s pulling out a nosehair, but they didn’t ask us to solve that problem.”
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