Applications for the position are currently being accepted (not really)
Small things can become big things. Aeneas, fleeing from the destruction of his home town of Troy, fell in love with Dido, the queen of Carthage. That was a small thing, people fall in love all the time. Even I fell in love with Dido when, in her despair at finding that Aeneas was abandoning her to go found Rome, “Sleep fled her eyes, as quiet fled her mind. /Despair, and rage, and love divide her heart”.
That shouldn’t happen to anyone.
The news of their love affair was spread across the sea by Fama, the Roman goddess of gossip, rumor and fame. The bible says we’re supposed to love our enemies (and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young say we’re supposed to love the one we’re with). The Aeneas and Dido affair was a case of prescient loving one’s enemy, for news of their aborted tryst, carried across the waters by Fama, led ultimately to the Punic wars (according to legend, at least). Virgil described Fama as, “at the start a small and cowardly thing, it soon puffs itself up, and walking upon the ground, buries its head in the clouds”. If you’ve ever read a copy of People’s magazine or Hello!, you know exactly what he meant about something small and inconsequential taking on giant proportions.
Surveys are collections of lots of small bits of information. William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book was one. The human genome project is another.
It’s not only gossip that can grow from the small to the large. Surveys are collections of many small facts and items of information; individually these facts are often inconsequential, but the survey may be greater than the sum of its parts. One of the first great surveys of public information was the Domesday survey, ordered by William the Conqueror of his new holdings in England. To make sure taxes and levies were correctly allotted, he ordered a survey of all the sources of income of the lords and counties. This included big things as well as the lesser. A coppice is a stand of small trees that is cut back periodically; the wood was used for baskets and barrels, poles and pikes, and whatever other uses one had of pliable wood before the advent of plastic and sheet metal, and in Domesday Book these are called silvia minutia, or ‘tiny woods’. A single coppice is not worth very much, but a single hamburger isn’t worth very much either, and yet McDonalds is worth over 100 billion dollars. Size may not matter, but numbers may. William had a lot of coppices, or at least, a number he felt was well worth counting.
A genomic sequence is another survey, with three billion entries per person. Even a simple survey of just a person’s most variable bits of their genome (since we are all 99.9% identical at the level of our genetic sequence) often has a million entries. Each entry in these surveys is a single base, just an A, C, T or G. Pretty small, and not very important.
I have one copy of the ΔF508 mutation in CFTR, and my wife harbors a grudging resentment against me for possibly endangering our children (despite that they all have two copies of perfect CFTR’s). This is the danger of being married to a geneticist.
Usually. A case currently in the California courts (Chadam v. Palo Alto Unified School District) could conceivably revolve around a single base in a boy’s genome. The child’s parents stated in a health form supplied with the child’s school enrollment information that he had a marker (or markers, the court documents use both forms) associated with cystic fibrosis (CF). CF is a genetic lung disease which often leads to lung infections. In people of European descent, mutations associated with this disease are common, about one in 30 carry a mutation in the CFTR gene. Both copies of one’s CFTR genes need to carry a mutation for one to be at risk of CF. I have one copy of the DeltaF508 mutation in CFTR, and my wife harbors a grudging resentment against me for possibly endangering our children (despite she and them all having two copies of perfect CFTR’s). This is the danger of being married to a geneticist.
Children with CF are susceptible to infection from communicable lung diseases carried by other CF children. In regards to the Chadam’s case, a teacher in the Palo Alto school (incorrectly) informed the parents of a student with CF that the Chadam’s child also had CF. This parent requested that the Chadam’s child be transferred to a different school, and their request was granted. The Chadams complained, stating that their child didn’t have CF, and their boy was allowed to return to school.
The Chadam’s boy and his parents probably disagree on whether this was a victory or not.
It’s not clear whether the Chadams reported to the school that their boy had only one copy of a CF mutation, in which case he will almost certainly never have CF, or if he had two copies but hadn’t shown any symptoms of CF. If the former, then the school’s reaction was ridiculous. Probably in one out of three classrooms there is child or teacher who is a carrier of a CF mutation, all of whom are no more likely to provide a risk to a child with CF than is anyone else. If the Chadams had disclosed that their boy had mutations in both copies of his CFTR genes, then the school’s actions were only probably ridiculous. The DeltaF508 mutation (it’s not disclosed what mutation(s) the boy has) is highly penetrant in conjunction with another CFTR mutation. That is, most people who have this mutation plus another CFTR mutation (there are about 30 relatively common mutations in CFTR linked to CF) develop CF. Other CFTR mutations have much lower penetrance. It’s possible that if the boy did have two copies of highly penetrant mutations in CFTR, even if he didn’t show any symptoms of the disease, he could be seen as a potential health risk to the student with CF. In this case there is a chance that he will develop CF and present lung infections which could be communicable to other children with poor health. It’s not much of a risk in the absence of any symptoms, but a potential risk, nonetheless. Then again, so is crossing the street.
A single base in a child’s genome could potentially mean the difference between the school having a right to disclose his genotype, or not.
The legal ramifications of the case are beyond my ken, see here and here for a more learned discussion. But it does show once again the importance of small things. A single base in a child’s genome could potentially mean the difference between the school having a right to disclose his genotype, or not having the right. The US has rules against using genetic information in the decision to hire or insure people, but those restrictions don’t apply to most other aspects of life (such as schools). Currently the case has been ruled against the Chadams, meaning that a district court agreed with the school that the Chadam’s complaint of discrimination was not supportable, but it’s in appeal.
Surveying wasn’t just important for William I and his desire to enumerate the silvia minutia of England, the importance of surveys became firmly entrenched in the forest laws of the land. The title of the chief officer of the Crown’s woods and chases was “Surveyor-General”. This august gentlemen was in charge of determining the extent and domains of all the king’s woods. As laid out in forest law, people had some rights to how this land was used, and clear delineations of the land was very important in determining who had the rights to do what, and where they could do it.
It’s possible we’re moving into similar territory with our own genomes. Applicants for the post of Surveyor General of the Genome won’t need their own theodolite (those telescope like instruments surveyors use to measure angles), but familiarity with large databases is a plus.
