Do You Really Want to Know?
2012 film by John Zaritsky
Do You Really Want to Know? is a 2012 documentary film directed by John Zaritsky and produced by Kevin Eastwood. Using interviews and dramatic recreations, the film recounts the stories of three families who carry the gene for Huntington's disease, a neurodegenerative illness which is the result of a genetic abnormality, whose symptoms typically appear in mid-life. Members of each featured family have undergone predictive testing to learn whether or not they have inherited the gene that causes the disease, and they each describe the impact that testing has had upon their lives. Do You Really Want to Know? had its world premiere in Canada at the 2012 DOXA Documentary Film Festival and its broadcast premiere on November 13, 2012, on Knowledge Network.
Plot
The main subjects of the film are Jeff Carroll, a US Army Veteran and Huntington's disease researcher from Washington; Dr. John Roder, a renowned cancer specialist at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto; Theresa Monahan of Ohio, who was among the first Americans to undergo predictive testing for Huntington's disease in 1988, and Dr. Michael R. Hayden, who is the director of the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics at the University of British Columbia, and the world's most-cited researcher with regard to Huntington's disease.
Jeff Carroll's story involves learning about his family's genetic history after he was already married and considering having children.
“Do You Really Want to Know?” enters the record as 2012 film by John Zaritsky. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Really, Want and Know can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5286366. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2012 and 1988.
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This entry incorporates text from “Do You Really Want to Know?” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.