Type 1 diabetes, which typically strikes children and young adults, is an autoimmune disease in which our own immune system attacks and destroys the insulin-producing cells of our pancreas. Untreated it’s deadly, but even with well-managed insulin replacement, it may shorten life expectancy by a decade. “Families are devastated when a child receives a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes…Thus, one of modern medicine’s ‘holy grails’” is to understand what causes the body to attack itself, in the hopes that we can cure or prevent the disease. Genetic susceptibility plays an important role, but the “concordance for type 1 diabetes is only about 50% among identical twins.” So, even if someone with our exact same DNA gets the disease, there’s only about a 50 percent chance we will get it, too—meaning there must be external factors as well.