Nephrogenic diabetes insipidus. A personal perspective.

To summarize these ideas that all center around time and variations, we might think of the genes as constituting a biological memory that serves at once to connect individuals with other people and with the past. The genes also provide a plan to construct and maintain an individual homeostatic memory that mediates experiences in the context of an ontogenetic memory that preserves individuality through time and change to set on health and disease a personal stamp. It is the mission of medicine to understand the individuality of these memories and of the elements that constitute them and, where necessary, to adjust the environment to homeostatic limitation. It is my hope that this account of this often colorful but hapless and stricken family might give substance to these thoughts.