What is it like to be a very rare person, one who looks enough like everyone else to be clearly human and at the same time looks like no one most of us have ever seen before? Where are the edges of personhood? What traits of our being merit recognition of our full humanity, with all the claims of care that this entails? Are there physical characteristics which would mark someone as not worthy of acceptance into the human community, as not worthy of life? Most of us, religious or not, hold to the principle that all people are created equal: not the same, but equal in our claim to recognition, equal in our just claim on opportunities to flourish. But those who are very different can find it extraordinarily difficult to be accepted as fully human, difficult to press their claims to the recognition which we all, social creatures that we are, require. The life of a young man named Sammy Basso offers us an occasion to contemplate what it might mean to live on the very edge of the human community.

Sammy Basso had an enigmatic genetic condition called progeria, which causes what looks like rapid aging.