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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.
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.
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
"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!
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.
> 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
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 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
Even if we assume parents will usually make good decisions in these matters, where it really gets ugly is when the state decides what constitutes the master race.
I think the best uses of this would be to eliminate genetic traits that we can all agree are undesirable - I think it would be good if my (purely hypothetical) children didn't have to have the sort of orthodontic work I did, or have my high cholesterol. But I'm not at all sure I would interevene to make them taller, or smarter.
What I really look forward to is complete physical and genetic modification of exisiting persons - get some heavy-duty nanotech and gene therapy going and let me choose for myself how tall and how smart I want to be. That's much further off.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
...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.
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
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...