The family with no fingerprints
image captionAt least four generations of Apu Sarker's family have an extremely rare condition leaving them with no fingerprints Apu Sarker was showing his open palm to me on a video call from his home in Bangladesh. Nothing seemed unusual at first, but as I looked closer I could see the smooth surfaces of his fingertips. Apu, who is 22, lives with his family in a village in the northern district of Natore. He was working as a medical assistant until recently. His father and his grandfather were farmers. The men in Apu's family appear to share a genetic mutation so rare it is thought to affect only a small handful of families in the world: they have no fingerprints. Back in the day of Apu's grandfather, having no fingerprints was no big deal. "I don't think he ever thought of it as a problem," Apu said. But over the decades, the tiny grooves that swirl around our fingertips - known properly as dermatoglyphs - have become the world's most collected bio...