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Genome
There is much more to each of us than a genetic code, writes Ridley, "[b]ut until now human genes were an almost complete mystery. We will be the first generation to penetrate that mystery. We stand on the brink of great new answers but, even more, of great new questions. This is what I have tried to convey in this book."
And he's succeeded, brilliantly, even entertainingly. Genome isn't about the Human Genome Project itself, but rather about what the project is uncovering in labs all over the world. Some time this year, geneticists say they will probably have a rough draft of the complete human genome. In a short time, we will have gone from knowing little about genes to knowing nearly everything.
The human genome, the complete set of genes housed in 23 pairs of chromosomes, form Ridley's outline for what he terms an autobiography of our species. Spelled out in a billion three-letter words using only the four-letter alphabet of DNA, the genome has been altered, edited and handed down for more than three billion years. With the first human-readable draft of the genome poised on the horizon, we -- the people Ridley calls "this lucky" generation" -- are the first beings who will be able to read and ponder this profound document about what it means to be, well, us.
In Genome, Ridley picks one newly-discovered gene from each of the 23 human chromosomes and tells its story, in the process recounting some of the history of our species. Ridley weaves each chapter to be more compelling than the one before. Genes that cause disease, influence language, behavior and intelligence, genes that enable us to write grammatically, that guide the development of biology and intelligence, that permit us to remember, that relate ultimately to selfishness, hope, fate, self-interest, instinct and history.
Ridley aptly promises what he calls a "whistle-stop tour of some of the more interesting sites in the genome and what they tell us about ourselves." Some stops along that tour aren't pretty -- from the creation of Luca, the Last Universal Common Ancestor (she looked like a bacterium and lived in a warm pond) to the blood-curdling research of Nazi scientists.
Two of the most powerful chapters come towards the end -- his horrific recounting of the history of eugenics, the perverted use of genetics to breed superior humans, and his chapter on free will. This chapter raises the most elemental question when it comes to the genome, one the world has and will continue to debate: do we truly have free will, or is our behavior and fate genetically pre-determined?
Ridley's answer is both affirming and disturbing.
This is an amazing book. It's hard to imagine a more sweeping, powerful or complex subject, yet Ridley, a former science editor and reporter, has made it completely accessible, clear and comprehensible. Genetics is important to every single human being, yet few people know much about it. But in Genome, hardly a paragraph is anything but lucid. You could give it to your grandmother and she'd have little trouble getting through it, or grasping its monumental significance.
Beyond that, Ridley's great ambition for the book, declared in his preface, isn't just hype. We are, in fact, on the verge of one of the great intellectual achievements in human history. We are about to learn more about ourselves, the way we evolve, and our behavior than anybody before us has ever dared to imagine. This is a book we all urgently need to read. We are entering a new era in human knowledge and self-awareness, and few of us are really prepared for it. This book will help get you ready.
Purchase this book at ThinkGeek.
Can this book be trusted? Seems like the gnomes and the Illuminated Masters are up to no good.
I'd be interested to see how it works in relation to the wirtings of Lyall Watson, Richard Dawkins, et al. And what perspective he takes on the whole use and puropose of genetics.
Nice to see a book on genetics looking into Eugenics as well, especially as they are bringing it in through the back door, trying to iron out the imperfections of humanity through genetic tweaking.
Hmm, more books, less time...
Working for the (other) man
Is it my imagination or does every generation make the claim that they're living through the greatest, or most pivotal, or most interesting point in human history?
I'd like to see someone claim that they're living in the most unimportant and trivial years in human history.
Seriously, this is a decent article.
Does the fact that we all have 23 genes mean that the creator is part of AA? (It's far too long since I read those books).
Gamma Testing - Where testing is extended to the full user community (AKA Shipping the Program)
booksamillion.com has it for $15.60!
Katz Rules
He Rules
Rules Rules
What a joke. The genome project is technological, not intellectual.
The human race has forgotten the difference.
If this is really the Major question addressed by the book(tm), then I'm a little concerned. The answer is no, we've known that the "nurture" has a pretty big effect, probably as much as "nature" since the 60s when studies of twins were done.
Also, at least based on the review this book doesn't seem to cover what the most important issue is relating to genetics these days is (at least as I see it): the morality of these choices we are giong to be facing. If we do map the genome then we are going to have the ablity to change it, at least in our children. Even now it would be trivial to decide if a child is male or female, has blue eyes or brown. What happens when this becomes cheap (its comming soon) and the masses get ahold of this. Just think about what would happen if China (for instance) decided that its citizens had the right to choose whether their children could be male or female. Considering how valued male children are now, what choice would most Chinese citizens make. Would this be a good thing? I don't know, but we've got to start asking these questions.
--Chris
IANAG, but it seems to me that if we are made up of a "billion three letter words" (codons?), that means that there are (only) a billion factorial different genetic ids for humans to take? So what is the proabability of there being someone else on Earth having the same genetic makeup as me?
Another greatest moment! Will History never cease to amaze us? Thank goodness for popular science. Still, one wonders if the human genome project is revealing anything new about whether our actions are free or determined. This question has actually been debated before, at several of History's greatest moments. In "Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals" Kant claims that we have to believe both that we are free and that we are determined.
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
Ridley is one of the best popularisers of "Evolutionary Psychology" around, along with Stephen Pinker and, of course, Dawkins. And what we are learning from EP about human behaviour is making all our psychology, and most of our politics, as obsolete as the flat earth.
Genome sucks, KDE rules! Thats all I have to say. Oh and one more thing....(see below)
Trolling for Scooby doo!
And screw Scappy too!
Hardware is interesting but software more so. We are not equal to our genes. I think the people who make this mistake haven't grown up around twins.
"You could give it to your grandmother and she'd have little trouble getting through it, or grasping its monumental significance."
Geesh Jon! Ya think?
ah! the internet!! we may still screw up the world but NEVER again will we be able to claim IGNORANCE
Interesting convergence of two sciences in genomics: biology and computing.
In the first pass, computers accelerate the
decoding of the complex human genome by allowing
the "shotgun" method: chop into a million pieces,
decode, and statistically reassemble.
In the next phase, computers will help identify
and guess at the function of the expected 100,000
proteins in the genome. The function of only a couple percent are currently known. A quarter to a third can be currently guessed at from similarities to known ones.
Will knowing all this explain life?
Actually not. This brings to mind an ancient Chinese curse that I read;
"May you live in interesting times"
The origin of this is said to be a Chinese peasant in the first(?) dynasty, roughly 4900 years ago. At the time bands of warlords were ravaging the area in their quest for power, and the *ideal* dream of most normal people was to have simple peace and quiet.
This is a great time, and the genome project as it has started is an amazing insight, but there is still so much more to do
Mining the 3 billion genes has to be carried out, and there's a need for advanced computing systems to process all the data; the small sample space that the codes are derived from is going to take a _long_ time to be compatible with the rest of humanity, etc. .. much to do
But it is clear that society stnads on the shoulders of a revolution accelerated by the global information society; arguably this revolution has been occurring for some time, but it is just now that it truly reaches the epoch of speed and consolidation, and perhaps this epoch will continue.
This has got to stop. Reductionism is a porr excuse not to look around and get out of the lab once in a while.
Look what we have so far:
Greeks inventing Gods
Geneticists searching for the gene that makes you a geneticist
Physicists inventing theories that predict particles to solve problems in other people's theories (there's some unelemental about there being more sub particles than elements. I have a theory how that could be true but it would require fitting GR and QM nice and snug and I'm afraid there's an uncertainty principle about accurately describing both of those two at the same time.)
I believe making bacterial machinery to eat oil is great it shows hard work and intelligence. The rest is a little arrogant and overrated. No intent to build a consistent theory. Just get the pills out who cares.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Thanks Jon for this interesting review. But please understand that we know very little about what all these ATCG's are doing. Going from the genomic sequences to the genes will take time. And understanding what all these genes are doing will take even more time. We have now barely scratched the surface. We don't even know how many genes we have (probably between 80 and 150K), and many of our genes make several proteins. Proteins are involved in complex pathways and
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
This whole thing worries me a great deal. I'm for eliminating genetic blindness and defects like those, but as for eliminating a particular eye color, or poor grammar, and such - how much of that is part of WHO we are? Some might even say I go too far with getting rid of blindness. Would Stevie Wonder have been a great musician if he had been sighted, and therefore not so focused on sounds? What Captain Kirk said to Sybok may apply very much in a situation like this: "I NEED my pain." Also: Katz, unlike many other readers of /., apparently, I LIKE your writings. But one word of advise. Lose the "Read More Below" bit. It already says that in the formatting of all of the articles on /.'s front page, anyway. :)
In reading this and reading some material over at the Human Genome project, I can't help but wonder if we're going to see a *major* shift in the way medicine is practiced within out lifetime.
Now, we visit specialists who have expertise in a particular system of the body and it's afflictions: gastroenterologists, dermatologists, cardiologists, etc. Once the genome is mapped out, and we dicover that certain ailments are controlled by particular chromosomes, I wouldn't be surprised at all to see medicince shift from the current systemic approach to a chromosome-based approach.
Because each cromosome is so complex, you'd have specializations in particular chromosomes (or maybe groups of related chromosomes). So you'd go to see your doctor, who would then refer you not to a cardiologist, but a chromologist (?) who had expertise in, say Chromosome 11, which appears to control the problems your having.
> made up of a "billion three letter words"
> (codons?), that means that there are (only) a
> billion factorial different genetic ids for
> humans to take? So what is the proabability of
> there being someone else on Earth having the
> same genetic makeup as me?
"Codons" is correct, and when you consider that there is a lot of genetic diversity that is NOT expressed in a given environment, and further consider the fact that the 'genetic deck' is shuffled each generation, the chances of finding an unrelated person of exactly the same genetic makeup are astronomical. Among those to whom you are related, the odds go down, but are still very high with one notable exception: Identical twins. And even identical twins show differences in development due to slight environmental differences as they develop in and out of the womb.
I have been involved with a major crop genome database since the late 1980's, and I have had the following quote on my office door since I first saw it in 1992:
There is little else I can say in response to Mr. Edelhart's comments.- --
--------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------
Computeri non cogitant, ergo non sunt
Given that, and the parental "obligation" to give the best they can for their children, doesn't that obligation extend to making sure they're as smart/strong/ueber as possible? Can we afford to not make the next generation utterly hyperintelligent and creative, considering how well we've done in the past *cough, cough*.
It's unlikely that there will be any sociological force great enough to counter the relentless march of technological progress excepting a jihad executed on a massive scale. Our species seems to have the tendency to do anything that can be done, anyway. Not that I'm complaining.
Knowledge/awareness does not imply understanding. If you take your average schmuck, give him a detailed topo map and a compass, and drop in the middle of a forest, chances are he will not be able to use the knowledge (the map) because he does not understand what the hell it's all about. Same seems to me to be the case with the human genome. Yeah, we may have all X billion mappings, but what good are they if we don't have the understanding to go with them? True, understanding will follow as the knowledge set becomes complete, but I would posit that the knowledge set itself is not the true accomplishment. Rather, the understanding that we may eventually come into will be the real achievement. Don't get me wrong, mappping the genome is an important first step, but it is NOT the most important step. If someone gave us a book written in the previously unknown Linear K alphabet, even if the book contained all the knowledge of the universe, it would be utterly useless until we learned to understand what the words said. The same is true of the genome project at this stage. Yeah, we can read a (relatively) few words of ATCG, but our understanding isn't all there yet. Sorry to be a party pooper, Mr. Katz, but I will hold my celebration until I feel it is warranted.
Windows is going the way of phlogiston...
Of course, most of your genes and gene sequences
will be owned by Corporate Intellectual Property groups. Want to come up with a cancer cure? Need to pay through the nose.
I think it's probably misleading to contrast inherited behavioural tendencies with free will like that. Obviously the choices we make will tend to be the choices humans make rather than those that (say) chimps or herring would make, but that doesn't affect the fact that the choices are freely made. We inherit the sorts of creatures (and to an extent the sorts of people) we are, but we're no more a slave to that than we are to our past experiences. I haven't noticed many people worrying about our ability to learn robbing us of our freedom.
Having said all which, does being "free" depend on not understanding why you make your decisions?
I don't know but bacon tastes good
I recently suggested that maybe a new temporary patent should be developed for a certain class of biotech discoveries, so companies can still profit from their research but not at the cost of new research. While I usually eschew nutty suggestions for new "classifications" and paperwork, I really can't come up with any other simple solution.
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
Sorry, the genome project produces DATA, not knowledge. The two are quite different, although they are often confused in this day and age.
Maybe IF we gain knowledge out of the DATA then your statement will be true. BTW, that is a bug "if". It is not clear that simply having the data will help us at all.
"Our species seems to have the tendency to do anything that can be done, anyway"
What a Eurocentric view. Take a look at Africa, the bushmen in Australia, the American Indian. They are all part of our species, but they do not exhibit the same tendencies.
The relentless march of technological progress is not so guarenteed.
Actually, knowledge DOES imply understanding. The map is not knowledge, it is data.
Other than that, I agree with you.
What are we doing interesting?
Spoiler alert:
The ending on the Human Genome project, philosophicaly, is going to be: genes set up lots of interesting potentials, some of them in fiendishly complicated interactions, that are, in every individual case, mostly going to be lost due to environment. We can do lots of stuff (and will be able to do more) that may or may not be a good idea.
What else is there?
Oh, yeah - the 'net. We have the best system for communication in the history of the world. And maybe someday we will have something to say on it. Woohooo - we can put the Sears catalog (well, not the Sears catalog as such, they stopped doing that) on the Web. My email to some guy in France last night thanking him for a bit of software he threw into the public domain was more important than that, in the grand scheme. Cooperation between far-flung strangers is one of the highlights of our culture.
Space exploration is plodding along sort of OK. But I don't see anything big being done in the next decade or two.
The big dreams of our culture are to have fewer kids getting stoned and possibly lower rates of some diseases for a while until the organisms get resistant. Some people dream of politicians who aren't quite as corrupt as the ones we have now. Others dream that we might be able to be a little less mean to each other.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
We apologize for the inconvenience.
...whole thing off.
In a new book Judith Harris, "The Nurture Assumption," a third, and perhaps more important alternative is looked into: the idea that a child's peer group has lasting impact on his/her development.
On another note, I don't like the tone of, "we have to start asking these questions." The usual result is that somebody (a mandarin or politician) asks the question, gets it answered by a lobby group, and the answer gets shoved down the throats of an unsuspecting public.
I - as someone who tends toward libertarianism - beleives that people will eventually find the right choice (perhaps after some wrong turns), but the choice they will find on such moral matters are often better than any answers from any political body.
To take the China example - even if boys were favoured every time, after a few years, the scarcity of females would probably make people value female children a lot more... and maybe there would be a natural decline in population first, but in the end, culture will adapt to the situation.
Heard a viscious rumour that the gene responsible for bombastic verbose journalism and literary diarrhoea has been isolated on /.
This is progress. Having identified it, we now know which of our children to kill.
On the strength of just the genome project and matters related to it? It may be very useful, but is hardly more interesting for requiring billions of AGCT sequences than a few thousand.
The most interesting ideas, IMHO, give great insights in forms which are often beautiful and compact. On these grounds filling a hard-disk's worth of mostly random data hardly counts.
Off the top of my head, here are some ideas that
start to justify "greatest
Invention of philosophy, history, drama, etc. as we know it in ancient Greece -- c 400 BC.
Shakespeare's tragedies -- c. 1600.
Darwin's theory of evolution -- c. 1850.
Discovery of general relativity and quantum mechanics, -- 1916-1930.
P.S. Feynman's thoughts in a similar vein
As should probably be clear, when talking about living organisms, we're talking about extremely complicated electrochemical machines here.
Sure, genes determine some critical information about the "hardware," but, like any complex machine, organisms are affected by use and environment.
The purely deterministic genetic view is pretty weak. For an amusing, somewhat outrageous analysis of the situation (and why Darwinism is *really* just a flavor of Christianity), check out Brian Goodwin's "How the Leopard Changed Its Spots (the evolution of complexity)". ISBN 1857992512.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
Of all the genes that are going to be characterised in our genome, we share a large proportion (I apologise for not having an exact figure here) with most other organisms including the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and the bacterium Escherichia coli. These latter genetic systems have been extremely well-characterised by extensive resesarch over the past decade or so. Thus, I suspect that to a large degree, much of what we will find in our genome will not come as any surprise.
What we have come to realise from what information is available is that most of the genetic variation that makes us biochemically, morphologically, and perhaps behaviourally different from one another is in the developmental regulation of these common genes. What is the more exciting aspect of the genome sequence is not each and every gene itself but the small sequences associated with, and perhaps even the spatial distribution of, these genes.
So the exciting discoveries will most probably not be in finding "the gene" for making one tall, but rather how patterns of developmental regulation -- in the varying spatial and temporal expression of a common pool of genes -- create variants in height.
This will require not a few, but rather thousands of genome sequences! I am waiting with bated breath for the technological advances in computing and mechanical power that will allow me to point a tricorder at each individual specimen and obtain a complete characterisation of its genome, contrasted with its phenotype (physical appearance). What's exciting is that this is in a sense already possible, with DNA chips that can measure the varying levels of transcription of each gene.
I have to concur with Ridley about one comment: This is a very exciting time to be in biology.
OK, I've never been religious. Ever. BUT, this whole genome project makes me think back to why science started. Science came about because people asked the enigmatic question "Why?" Scientists originally were people who were religious and were mainly looking to discover "God's plan." What happened was that they could not find God in their studies. Science then took the turn of trying to find out "Why?" without God in the picture. That's a very watered down history of science but with this genome project, I'm thinking that scientists may finally discover God. I've always found it amazing that every thought I've ever had is the result of chemical interactions going on in my brain. Trying to conceive that thought itself may one day be brought about in a lab has always disturbed me. With the genome project, what if they CAN'T figure out how to produce thoughts in the lab. They may discover that there is no other explanation beyond the supernatural. I consider myself a huge skeptic, but I also consider myself an agnostic. I don't know if there is a God nor do I claim to know, but I've an open enough mind that I'm willing to entertain many different theories. Just throwing out some mental candy for everyone.
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe...
Making a choice about what your kids are like by technology is no more immoral than making that choice by selecting a mate. The important difference is that it can be many times less painful and many times more effective.
Since when does Richard Dawkins support the idea that our genes control our behavior? Certainly not in The Selfish Gene, but I am not familiar with any of his other work. In The Selfish Gene he seems to take the opposite stance emphasising his belief that genes do not control our psyches. Please enlighten.
end of line
I wonder if the researchers on the Genome project use GNOME because they're almost spelled the same...
Mike Roberto
- roberto@apk.net
-- AOL IM: MicroBerto
Berto
Where are all the "Katz is a loser Katz a loser Katz is a loser", "stop whining and get over it", "you know nothing, while I have been using linux since 1963"-posts? These comments have been faked. Argh! Conspiracies again
My favourite Dilbert cartoon, paraphrased:
Dilbert: If you're so smart, how come you work here?
Egghead-type: Intelligence has less practical application than you'd think.
Would you choose to be hyperintelligent? Maybe being pretty/hunky and popular would be more fun. Maybe being normal rather than exceptional would be less disruptive to your parents' lives?
Avoiding or curing diseases and disabilities is not very controversial. Only the most die-hard type could object. But I do worry about people selecting kids in some sort of shopping list way: might we lose variety? In the same way the we now have peaches and tomatoes that bounce and taste of nothing, might we end up with a monoculture of humans that just aren't flexible and creative any more 'cause everyone is chosen from the same limited set of popular genomes?
Just my little science fiction story here. Hey, who's seen GATTACCA?
No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up.
Dawkins' comment is recorded on the flyleaf of Ridley's "The Origins of Virtue" as follows.
"If my The Selfish Gene were to have a volume two devoted to humans, I think The Origins of Virtue is pretty much what it ought to look like".
dear ignoramus
if we would have just 23 genes, we would have less genetic information than the simpler unicellular creatures we know. for example, a baker's yeast already contains approx. 6000 genes.
maybe you can now imagine that describing the build of a human being requires much more genes than 23...
I heartily recommend 'The Origins of Virtue' and I've heard that his even earlier work, 'The Red Queen' is also worth a look.
Another author, one who deals with one of the more amusing areas of EP, is Jared Diamond in his work 'Why is Sex Fun?'. (It's truly fascinating to know just how different people are in their sexual behaviour from most other animals, and to understand why. No I am not advocating bestiality, nor have I ever tried it or wanted to.) In fact, I'd recommend any of his work, although much of it's off-topic to this discussion. Rather like this comment, in fact.
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Salman Rushdie