I’m enrolled in Biology 212 this semester. It’s called “Genetics.” It should be called “Unlocking life’s mysteries: An exploration of why you have blue eyes even though neither of your parents do, why you should care about fruit fly pigmentation and pea pod textures, why you shouldn’t commit a crime if your brother has been arrested before, and how to argue with Supreme Court justices about patent law.”
I’m still searching for the most fitting title though. Genetics, you see, is not just about Mendelian inheritance, or the probability that you will develop a rare disease that affected neither of your parents but ailed your great-grandmother. Genetics is not fully encompassed by the superpowers of bacteriophage viruses, which can insert their own genetic material into foreign DNA and might help us beat cancer some day, nor by the acrobatic feats that our DNA sequences—wrapped up in chromosomes—can perform within our cells.
Genetics, I’m beginning to see, is politics. Genetics is ethics. Genetics is philosophy.
Before I go further, I have to give a shout-out to Professor Bateman, who has sparked my thinking on this by raising these issues alongside the relevant “hard science” during class lecture.
The Supreme Court, for example, is now considering two different cases closely intertwined with emerging genetic technologies. In one, it is deciding whether the private firm Myriad Genetics can hold patents for two genes closely associated with breast and ovarian cancers.
A quick summary of the issues at hand in super formal legal terms: “Are these isolated genes simply products of nature, like a tree or a rock or a liver, or is sufficient ingenuity required to isolate these genes and thereby warrant a patent?”
In the other, the Court will determine whether DNA can be collected from people arrested for crimes—“Is DNA collection analogous to fingerprinting,” the musings go, “or would the practice be more similar to unreasonable search and seizure?” In both cases, we’ve got non-scientists evaluating scientific questions with huge implications that extend far beyond a technical discussion of the scientific facts at hand.
Even though these non-scientists are arguably super smart non-scientists, I say, “whoa.”
And what’s all this talk about genetic testing anyway? As the technology for DNA sequencing becomes increasingly affordable and efficient, we should probably start considering the ways in which the ability to “know your genome” might affect us. We considered some tricky hypotheticals in my lab the other day.
Imagine, for example, that you can get tested for the probability that you will develop acne, lactose intolerance, macular degeneration, breast cancer or testicular cancer in your lifetime. The test cannot tell you with certainty that you will develop a given condition, but you can assume that a “positive” genetic test has an 85-95 percent correlation with the condition.
Would you get tested?
How would your decision change if that correlation was only 10-20 percent? What about if you knew your insurance company would receive the test results and alter your insurance rates accordingly (if you had negative results, your rates would decrease, but even just one positive result would increase your rates substantially)?
Perhaps the best part of genetics blending with daily life is that I will finally be able to predict whether I wear glasses or not. If I wear glasses, I probably push my glasses up my nose whenever they feel like they’re slipping down. Which means my hand probably touches the bridge of my nose more than other parts of my face. So, by comparing the genetic composition of bacteria on the rest of my face to the genetic composition of the “microbiome” on the bridge of my nose, I’ll have my answer. If they’re different, I’ve probably got glasses. If they’re basically the same, I’m probably blessed with unaided 20/20.
Like I said earlier: “Biology 212: Unlocking life’s mysteries.”