The hereditary anemias, Diamond-Blackfan and 5q-syndrome, are caused by haploinsufficiency of ribosomal proteins S14 and S19, and recent data show that these anemias can be ameliorated by pharmacologic doses of L-leucine (Jaako et al., 2012; Payne et al., 2012), which activates mTORC1 signaling through S6K and promotes translation. The gene discussed is RPS6KB1; the disease is hereditary anemia.