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A father’s fight to help his sons — and fix clinical trials

Nick Sireau’s quest to give his sons weedkiller could help thousands struggling with rare genetic conditions.
  1. David Adam

    1. David Adam is Nature’s Editorials editor and is writing a book on AKU with Nick Sireau.

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Nick Sireau

Nick Sireau quit his job to help find an effective treatment for alkaptonuria. Credit: Brian David Stevens

Red cabbage? Nick Sireau couldn’t understand why the doctor was asking about red cabbage. It was late one night in October 2000, and Nick and his wife Sonya had just made an alarming discovery. Urine from their two-week-old baby son Julien had suddenly turned dark red, almost black. The physician who came to their cramped London flat assured them that it wasn’t blood. Perhaps, he suggested, the pigment from some red cabbage that Sonya had eaten for lunch had made it into her breast milk and was colouring the boy’s urine. He told them it was nothing to worry about.

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Nature 565, 148-151 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-00035-x

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 11 January 2019: An earlier version of this timeline erroneously located the National Alkaptonuria Centre in Cambridge, UK.

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