Austen Muelder was born on August 20,2002, in a hospital in Santa Barbara, California, a healthy baby in every visible respect. Shortly after his birth, Austen's mother, Angela, was handed a booklet describing the blood testing that the state wished to perform on her son.
California had begun an experimental program to screen newborns for two dozen genetic disorders, a great leap from the four tests required. Angela had no hesitation "if it was going to be for his health." With a small lancet, a nurse stuck Austen's heel. She held his foot over a card of cotton filter paper while blood dropped onto five circles in a row. When the spots dried, the test was mailed to a state lab in Los Angeles for screening. Angela and her husband, Jayson, took Austen home to grandmother Linda Fernandez's house in Ojai. Everything was fine for a month.
"A perfect baby;' Angela remembers. "He had clammy hands and feet, though," says Jayson. "That's kind of odd, we thought, the cold sweats on his feet. He had to wear socks all the time. It didn't seem like anything bad or abnormal, though. The skin clamminess signaled a serious digestive disorder.
Within Austen's system a metabolic time bomb was ticking, yet for six weeks nobody was able to hear it. Then on the afternoon of October 4, a Friday, his parents got a phone call from the genetics and metabolic disease clinic at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Bring your baby to Los Angeles on Monday morning, they were told, and make sure he eats regularly in the meantime. A state laboratory in Berkeley had just flashed the results of the blood test. Austen's life may have been saved by a system known as tandem mass spectrometry.
