...Lillian Carter did live to be 85 years old, I believe outliving all of her children save the former President.
I do not know enough about the etiology of pancreatic cancer to say whether the L16R mutation in the CDKN2A-p16 protein is a necessary cause of it; it seems likely one could get it from other causes.
If in fact, your father did have this mutation, assuming that he was heterozygous, and your mother didn't, you would only have a 50% chance of inheriting the L16R mutation. It does seem that the Carter family had two heterozygous parents, Jimmy senior and Lillian, and I would guess that Ruth, who died first, would be the 1 in 4 who was homozygous for the cancer gene, and that Billy and Gloria were heterozygous, and that Jimmy was the 1 in 4 who was completely recessive. Of course, it doesn't have to be this way; there was a probability that all of them could have been either homozygous L16R or all L16L (1 in 256 either way), but their family history does encompass the most probable outcome.
I would advise to be aware of the risks; don't obsess, but keep them in mind. I have outlived both my parents considering the age at which they died, and I count that as pretty good.
I have always thought that the worst energy decision of the 20th century was Jimmy Carter's cancellation of reprocessing as a "moral example," but on reflection, the way it played out in spite of the bad reasoning behind it, it was probably for the best.
An American nuclear recycling plant under construction in the 1970's and 1980's would almost certainly have been a Purex plant which would have had enough cause for the dumb-assed anti-nukes to engage in paroxysms of very dangerous selective attention relating to danger, much as they have done at Sellafield and La Hague, both plants having nonetheless saved lives.
The best thing President Carter did for nuclear energy was to live a long, and frankly magnificent life. He had flaws, but as a human being, he was one of our country's finest moral examples, poor decisions on nuclear energy notwithstanding.
Within 8 years of his Presidency, the Democratic Party put up an Ed Markey kind of anti-nuke, two years after Chernobyl. By this time I had personally changed my mind on nuclear energy from anti-nuke to pro-nuke and although I voted for Dukakis, it was painful to do so.
The real worst decision in energy in the 20th century was cancellation of the IFR, not because I think that sodium cooled fast reactors are even remotely close to being the best option for the fast spectrum, but because the IFR recycling chemistry was innovative and vastly superior to Purex. And...although I'm not a FLIBE kind of guy...the reprocessing of molten salts was also superior to Purex.
I've worked out to satisfaction of my own mind anyway - I'm dumping these ideas on my son before I die (and hopefully will live long enough to complete it) - a system of fuel reprocessing that contains both, with a healthy dollop of membrane driven type separations.
My generation - your generation - grew up under the specter of nuclear war MAD (mutually assured destruction) school yard testosterone driven puerile threats, and we thus refused to acknowledge that what is true, that the world cannot survive without nuclear energy. Many of us - certainly not me, certainly not you - focused on the small risk of wholesale death at the expense of the very large, and rapidly growing risk of vast death and destruction as a result of climate change, and of course, deaths from chemical air pollution.
Although Al Gore was a "renewables will save us" kind of guy, by bringing the very real issue of climate change to the public eye, he did nuclear energy a service as well. Reality has a way of penetrating into serious issues, and it very true that without nuclear energy as the primary source of energy - I would argue, except for special cases the only source of primary energy - there is no hope, zero probability, of saving what's still left to save.
Thanks for your comments.
Be well.
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