In the early 1970s, a colleague of Stanford University’s William Dement remarked on the resemblance of a narcolepsy patient’s symptoms to those of a recent canine patient he had read about. The similarity of the symptoms—excessive daytime sleepiness, sudden switch from an awake state to rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, sleep paralysis, and muscle weakness called cataplexy—prompted psychiatrists at the center to track down a narcoleptic dog of their own to study, and then to gather a kennel full of such dogs to figure out what caused the disease. When Dement bred two affected Doberman pinschers in 1976, he found that their narcolepsy was genetic; many of the puppies had...
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