The Charter of the Genome – Like a pilgrimage to Canterbury, but with more genetics

Genetics To End All War (and bring about universal peace)

October 23, 2016 No Comments

An understanding of how our genes may be tied to our political choices and social bonds could help lessen our partisan discord- if we let it.

Conflict seems to be a part of the human spirit. A good story needs conflict, otherwise we’re apt to find it dull. A story about making a sandwich is not going to be very interesting, even if it looks like it would be a good sandwich. Ingredients will be laid out, and a sandwich will be made. There is no suspense, no tension. Sandwich aficionados will know this to be not completely true, as there is a certain unpredictability, even magic, in the creation of a good sandwich, and the hoped for outcome cannot be completely assured. Nonetheless it’s telling that “making a sandwich” is not a major fictional genre. However if I go to the kitchen to make that sandwich, and I see my son is reaching for the last two pieces of bread, now it’s interesting (to me). Steel cage death match is assured, and a story worthy of a last a direct-to-DVD movie is born.

Even if a story doesn’t appear to have conflict, we’ll insert it in our reading, just to add interest. For example, one bestselling book which has lots of conflict throughout, starts out with a story that’s ostensibly conflict free. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” It’s just a slice of life story- except before there was life- a simple portrayal of everyday events-except there was no day yet, that comes later. Nonetheless, I read conflict into this story. There is a tension between order and chaos, between something and nothing. It’s like a sandwich story, except with higher stakes. Whether or not Moses meant to have that in there, conflict exists.

Like conflict, depositing people into categories of ‘us vs them’ is not necessary for a good story, but it seems to help.

Another common story element is a clear delineation of who the good people in the story are, and who are the bad people. Although modern literature, outside of the oeuvre of Tom Clancy and ilk, may not support simplistic definitions of who is good vs bad, at least the depiction of “us” vs “them” is usually made clear. Even with anti-hero’s, like Holden Caulfield in the perennial high school assignment of Catcher in the Rye, or for the moderns among us, Deadpool, or Jayne in Firefly, it’s clear that these characters are “us”, they are on our team. Whoever they are angry at (or in the case of Jayne and Deadpool, about to kill) is “them”.

Acta Diurna, Outlaws of the Genomic Wastes

Gene Editing and the Need for Science Fiction

August 22, 2016 No Comments

Thinking outside the Punnett square

It’s the year 2035, and Crayola is releasing a new set of crayons for children who have been genetically modified to be tetrachromatic, able to see four primary colors instead of the usual three. Though the World Anti Doping Committee initially banned all “gene doping” of athletes, gene editing for improving basic health has become so widespread that the Anti Doping Code is rewritten to allow athletes to engineer any “naturally occurring genetic variation”. China, which has been petitioning for this change for over ten years, is predicted to medal in most events in next year’s summer Olympics. Designed for military use, a “smart dog” is the subject of a series of lawsuits that has finally worked its way this year to the Supreme Court. By accepting a writ of habeus corpus on behalf of the plaintiff, smart dogs were essentially granted the status of personhood. And in another court case, a now standard suite of gene edits that boost cognitive potential is deemed as essential care, and will thus be provided free of cost via the US National Health Service. On the lighter side, the passenger pigeon population in the United States reached over one million birds this year. Extinct since the early 1900’s, the bird was reclaimed via a massive series of gene edits to the related band-tailed pigeon. Similarly, the small herd of genetically reclaimed mammoths in Glacier National Park is doing well (despite the absence of glaciers in the park for the last five years).

Almost assuredly, none of those events will happen that year (hopefully we’ll have the passenger pigeons much sooner, for one). It’s hard to predict what is happening right now, let alone twenty years in the future. For that matter I’m often not even sure what happened yesterday. Nonetheless, there has recently been a lot of talk in the genetics community about the need for guidelines of gene editing. As discussed earlier, new technology is making it easier to apply a number of genetic changes to an embryo and potentially create designed people. Wisely, we’ve already started talking about where this technology will lead us, and some general guidelines on how to proceed are being discussed. The consensus is that before it can be applied to people, the technology needs to be safer, clearly benefit the recipient, and be subject to appropriate regulation.

Summa Scientia Genetica

Dark Genes

July 22, 2016 No Comments

The Genetics of Evil

A compilation of the 50 most evil villains in literature by the UK’s newspaper, The Telegraph, listed the devil at the number one position on its list. The number two position was given to a fictional rat. Samuel Whiskers, from Beatrix Potter’s story, The Tale Of Samuel Whiskers, is certainly a bad fellow. He steals from the house in which he lives, and tries to make Tom Kitten into a dumpling:

But determining whether Samuel Whiskers is truly evil is difficult. According to most Western traditions, evil is the absence of good, and doesn’t have an independent identity. Other traditions, such as Buddhism, in which evil is an intrinsic element of existence, or Zoroastrianism and Star Wars, in which good and evil are opposing forces, have different definitions. Even if we stick with Western definitions, the question of Samuel Whiskers still is not clear. According to Thomas Aquinas, evil is the absence of goodness which should be found in our nature. A rat, which is an omnivore, may be acting in accord with its nature when it tries to eat a kitten (Tom Kitten survives, by the way, and learns to avoid rats in the future), and thus is not really evil. At best we could say that he seems to be participating in a metaphysical evil, in that nature can seem cruel and evil. As Woody Allen said, “To me, nature is… I dunno, spiders and bugs and big fish eating little fish. And plants eating plants and animals eating…It’s like an enormous restaurant.”

A well fed rat may not be evil per se, but cooking a live kitten in a dumpling probably is.

So let’s suppose that Tom Kitten and Samuel Whiskers are both people, or at least, sentient beings, and judging by their clothing (Tom Kitten had a nice blue jacket before being covered in dough), that is a reasonable assumption. In this case, most would agree that Samuel Whiskers was performing a moral evil by going against our accepted moral order. Sentient beings don’t cook each other for their puddings. Furthermore, Aquinas also suggests that as our world is not in itself bad, evil must exist within our actions, not in the effect. In this case, a well fed rat (the result of eating Tom Kitten) is not an evil thing, per se. Rats deserve to be fed. However, rolling a live kitten into a dumpling is evil.

Why Samuel Whiskers is evil is an even more difficult question than determining if he is evil. All rodents are not bad to Beatrix Potter, as her Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse clearly attests. Therefore the problem must be something specific to Samuel. Still following Aquinas, the root cause of evil is our free will, we have been given the freedom to make bad choices, and we frequently do so. Aquinas states that maybe sometimes the temptation to transgress can come from that villain at the number one slot on The Telegraph’s list (Satan), but often not, it’s just our choice. Current thinking, which largely discounts a role of Satan in clinical psychology, specifically posits social and economic factors as main factors in prompting our transgressions. Additionally, since the 1960’s a genetic cause for moral evilness has also been a contested but active area of research.

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