What’s Wrong With Summer Stiers?

And even though Turner and the others are part of the innovative new Undiagnosed Diseases Program at the N.I.H., and even though they collectively represent the very best that American medicine has to offer, they still began by approaching the big picture of Summer Stiers the way most specialists do: like the blind men, one piece at a time.

The Undiagnosed Diseases Program was designed to move past that halting first step — the inevitable result of the organ-by-organ orientation of most medical specialties — to achieve a more coherent view. Under the direction of William Gahl, a longtime N.I.H. investigator who is also the clinical director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, the program brings together scientists from most of the N.I.H.’s 27 research institutes and centers on a collegelike campus in Bethesda, Md. Organizationally, it creates a kind of superdiagnostician, whose orientation would be to look at not just one piece at a time but at the whole darn elephant.