Kelly Klump is a curly-haired, compact woman who is fascinated by eating disorders. Her own habits are healthy, but as a high school “peer counselor” she found herself besieged by girls struggling with the addictive starvation of anorexia nervosa and the compulsive binge-and-purge of bulimia. Now a 37-year-old associate professor at MichiganStateUniversity in East Lansing, Klump has spent the past 10 years probing the genetic influences in such illnesses and pondering a stubborn question about why biology makes women more likely targets than men for eating disorders.
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