Thank goodness I'm not a scientist!

Neither is Mr Kendrick. 
John why don't you express your specific concerns directly to Evgenii Rogaev at UMass?
Margarita
It doesn't take a scientist to understand that if this one single nucleotide substitution is "upstream" of an F9 exon... then it could be in an intron... which could also mean that it's nothing.
From Rogaev's abstract: "The mutation occurs in F9... and is
*predicted* to alter RNA splicing and lead to production of a truncated form of Factor IX."
From GenomeWeb: "The researchers concluded that the mutation creates a premature stop codon in the F9 gene... that
*suggests* Alexei had a form of hemophilia called Hemophilia B."
The use of the words "predicted" and "suggests" now make it quite clear that this is
not a certainty. It is, in fact, only an assumption... because, after all of their searching, this is the only possibility they could find on either the F8 or F9 gene. It actually still needs to be confirmed as the cause... before it can be said to be fact.
Nor can it now be extrapolated backwards to assume that Queen Victoria had also carried this same single nucleotide substitution... as the subject line of this thread now suggests. You
cannot now say that for a fact, unless you now also exhume Victoria and test her for the presence of that very same nucleotide substitution... just as GD George had been exhumed to test for the presence of that C/T heteroplasmy that was found in Nicholas.
Everything that is now being claimed about this one single F9 nucleotide substitution is merely an assumption, and nothing more... based solely on the fact that this one single nucleotide substitution is the
only thing that they could find on either the F8 or F9 gene. They have merely assumed that it must be the cause of the problem, simply because they have failed to find anything else.
The conclusion that they are now assuming does not necessarily follow without definite confirmation... which they do not now have.
If, for example, Prince Philip and his daughter Princess Anne or Lord Louis's daughters Patricia and Pamela Mountbatten can now also be found to have this very same F9 nucleotide substitution... then the discovery of this one lonely nucleotide substitution "upstream" of a Factor IX exon actually means nothing at all... because the disease does
not exist in that matrilineal branch of the family.
JK