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Pinxploitation

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It’s my favorite month: pink! My secret agent and I have been prowling the aisles, looking for the best in household items, tasty treats, and of course feminine products for the cure…er, but now that’s “cause,” ’cause Komen copped “cure” and will sue yer ass if you try to cure anything without their permission. I’ll bring you as many of these as I can, and meanwhile, read Samantha King’s Pink Ribbons, Inc., from UMN Press, or if you’re lazy, watch the movie. And feel free to submit more via the  comments!

We begin by noting how product endorsements can have odd resonances:

Wait, you sure this isn’t for ovarian cancer?

The Science of Human Perfection is Out!

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The book is now available on Amazon. Kindle edition can be pre-ordered–should be available Monday!

Decoding ENCODE

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When I was a science writer at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, back in the early 1990s, I attended the annual genome meeting and heard Sydney Brenner make his pitch for the fugu genome. The puffer fish—known to sushi aficionados and neurobiologists for its tiny gland that produces the neurotoxin tetrodotoxin—Brenner, said, has a marvelously condensed genome, free of “junk DNA.”

The standard dogma of the day was that the human genome was 99% junk—an evolutionary midden-heap, strewn with the discarded wrecks of past experiments, genes that had mutated out of all functionality, mind-numbing repetitive sequences where the polymerase got stuck and churned out the nucleotide version of Nebraska, and spare parts that might be used in assembling some future genetic component. The Human Genome Project would take far longer and be far more expensive if we tried to sequence all of it, Brenner said. By studying the fugu genome, he argued, we could cut to the chase, learning about the genes without sifting through all this trash; perhaps then we could use fugu genes to identify the functional sequences in the human genome. But Brenner’s Fugu Genome Project went into science’s own scrapheap. Not long after this meeting, Craig Venter’s shotgun sequencing techniques began to accelerate the Human Genome Project, shortening the projected finish time and slashing budget projections. The Fugu Genome Project continued, but it had nothing like the impact Brenner envisioned.

Barbara McClintock, from CSHL Archives

Then I went back to grad school, studied the history of science, and began my dissertation research on Barbara McClintock, the maize geneticist who worked at Cold Spring Harbor for half a century and who won a Nobel prize in 1983 for her discovery of mobile genetic elements. Late in her career, McClintock became deeply interested in all forms of gene regulation. Development and evolution were united in her mind by means, dimly understood, of turning genes on and off and modulating their activity. She was convinced there was a higher-order organization that controlled the genes; phenotypes resulted from patterns of gene action. Most people think that McClintock’s discovery of transposable elements was ignored or dismissed by the scientific community. I found that wasn’t true. They believed that McClintock had found movable elements. They just didn’t believe those elements controlled evolution. McClintock’s late work continued her theme of gene regulation and interaction. The genome, she wrote, was a “sensitive organ of the cell,” dynamic and responsive—not a blueprint or an instruction manual.

Study of the human and other genomes has revealed that “junk DNA” is itself junk—much of that noncoding sequence is involved in gene regulation. Some of it is of the sort that McClintock envisioned; some is beyond even her imagination. The genome is now understood in terms much closer to McClintock’s mystical-sounding notion. As I wrote in my book, The Tangled Field, she deserves more credit as an early proponent of the complex, dynamic genome.

This week, the genome community has been all aflutter with news of the ENCODE project, a sophisticated genome database that catalogs patterns of gene activity. It turns out that most of Brenner’s junk DNA, isn’t. Much of that non-gene sequence is deeply important to gene function: it’s full of regulatory sequences, what the press are calling “switches,” that determine how and when and in what context the genes act. Had the National Institutes of Health invested as heavily in fugu as Brenner had hoped, it would likely have taken much longer to reach this level of subtle understanding. As Michael Eisen points out in a nice critique of the science media machine, none of this is actually news. The junk DNA model has been out of style in science for years, and the ENCODE project has not identified “millions of switches” that regulate the genome. More accurate to say, it has identified millions of potential switches—all the science of those switches still has to be done. Many of the science writers who have plumped this story simply dressed up the ENCODE project’s press release, dumbing down a lot of complex science into an easily digestible but historically misleading narrative.

Oversimplification is endemic in both science and science journalism. The former is a set of methods for making the complex simple—and the latter is a set of methods for making science simple. I did both before studying history, which is a set of methods for making the simple complex—or, rather, for decoding the complexity in what we oversimplify. Addressing subjects as massively complex and integrated as the genome—or the brain, or the immune system, or an ecological community—requires both approaches.

Latest book news

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Official release date for SoHP is 9/25; I have hardcover in my hot little hands already. Yay!
Working on a piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education, and now HuffPost wants an essay of 800-1000 words.

Our Future—Together and Individually

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I’ve been offline for a few weeks, but I’ve had good reason this time: I got married and went on a cross-country honeymoon!

But naturally, my work follows me, even into the County Clerk’s office. My bride and I got married in California, and when we applied for a marriage license, as required by law they handed us a booklet entitled “Your Future Together: Health Information You Need to Know.”

We need to know, apparently, a wide range of health information, spanning general nutrition, domestic violence, sexually transmitted diseases, and birth control, and that government services are available to prevent, treat, or enable each of them as appropriate. But the largest number of pages in the booklet is devoted to genetic disorders, screening, and counseling. My bride and I were struck immediately by the fact that genetics would be so front-and-center in a booklet on the public health of marriage.

Should we cue the sinister-music soundtrack? Not necessarily—but the booklet does raise questions about the similarities and differences between contemporary genetic public health and that good ol’ time eugenics.

The booklet is produced by the Genetic Disease Screening Program, a branch of the California Department of Public Health. The program’s published mission is “To serve the people of California by reducing the emotional and financial burden of disability and death caused by genetic and congenital disorders.” As a historian of genetics and eugenics, I find this more than a little troubling. In the Progressive era, eugenicists such as the Yale economist Irving Fisher used “financial burden” as an important justification for promoting sterilization and sequestration of “defectives”—those with genetic diseases, either physical or mental. Serving the people of California by reducing the financial burden of genetic disease is a form of population improvement, full stop.

As it has ever been, the segment of the population that most needs improving is the poor, which in California is largely Latino. California’s “PACT” program (“Planning, Access, Care and Treatment”) provides comprehensive family planning services to low-income residents, including:

  • birth control
  • pregnancy testing
  • sterilization (male and female)
  • STI testing and treatment, including HIV
  • hepatitis B vaccine

Wait…what?

Yep, state-sponsored sterilization. Now, of course, that sterilization is not compulsory. California repealed its compulsory sterilization law…in 1979. That reversal was prompted, the year before, when 10 Latinas sued the state of California for sterilizing them, without informed consent or simply against their will. Although they ultimately lost their case, historian Alexandra Stern argues that the suit had a significant impact on the required stipulations for sterilization. She also highlights the issue of race, pointing to the long history of anti-Mexican sentiment and the relative dearth of information on genetic screening and testing in Spanish. I searched in vain for a version of the brochure en Español. “Your Future Together” is in English only.

The booklet also presents the reader with an extremely simple-minded introduction to genetics—basically a 1930s view of genetic disease:

Genetic disorders are not contagious. That is, they cannot be “caught” like a cold. They can only be passed down to your children through genes. Genes are tiny bits of information contained in the father’s sperm and the mother’s egg that form a blueprint for the baby.

Infectious diseases are spread “horizontally” through the population, while genetic diseases spread “vertically.” In 1933, the medical geneticist and avowed eugenicist Madge Macklin helped bring genetics into medicine by declaring,

It makes no difference whether the disease with which they are afflicted came to them by way of germs or germ plasm, the disease is transmissible, and so comes under the category of public health.

 I call this the “germ theory of genes.” Genetic diseases may not be contagious, but like infectious disease they have “silent” carriers, and in both cases you can stop their spread by isolating the carriers. The brochure goes on to list several genetic diseases that one’s baby will automatically be tested for:

  • Sickle cell disease
  • Thalassemia
  • Tay-Sachs
  • Familial dysautonomia
  • Cystic fibrosis

These diseases behave in a more or less Mendelian way. You can identify carriers (heterozygotes) and make predictions of likelihood (although not severity) of onset. But these are just a few of the 77 genetic diseases every child born in California is screened for. As the panel is expanded, it will include increasingly “complex” diseases—diseases more common in the population but with less straightforward patterns of heredity. As the genetic component in a given disease gets less and less, the predictive value of a genetic test goes down. And the difficulty of adequately informing a layperson about their genome goes way, way up.

This combination of an obsolete, simplistic presentation of genetics with an expanding, state-mandated panel of genetic tests places undue emphasis on heredity and leads to an overinflated view of the role of genes in health. Adequate health information needs to accurately reflect what we know of biology.

The next section is on genetic counseling. You should “definitely” talk with a genetic counselor, the booklet advises, if you answer “Yes” to any of a list of questions, including these:

  • Is anyone in your family or your partner’s family mentally retarded?
  • Have you had two or more miscarriages?
  • Have you been diagnosed with diabetes or with seizures (epilepsy)?
  • Are you related to your partner (for example, cousins)?

As I show in The Science of Human Perfection, these same questions were being asked a century ago by people we now brand as “eugenicists.” And they were eugenicists. They explicitly advocated the improvement of the race by genetic means, and happily referred to that practice as eugenics—while also being interested in relieving human suffering right there, right then, in their patients.

A Progressive-era eugenicist such as Charles Davenport, frozen and revivified, say, by the California-based American Cryonics Society, would find nothing to disagree with in “Your Future Together.” The understanding of the gene, the emphasis on intelligence and inherited diseases, the importance of avoiding inbreeding are all points that have been emphasized throughout the history of medical genetics, during the entire 20th century and now into the 21st. Davenport would have been pleased to find that so many diseases had been identified and tested for, and delighted that the state mandates screening for them. He would of course hope that individuals, properly educated by brochures such as this, would make the “right choices”—namely having many children if the tests come back negative, and abstaining from reproduction if they have bad genes.

Davenport would be disappointed, of course, in the lack of compulsory measures available to the state in the case of recalcitrant or incapacitated individuals. But eugenicists have long contented themselves with reliance on slow progress through education, and hoped for a future with a more enlightened and far-sighted reproductive policy. This view, of the relief of suffering in the short term and the elimination of disease and ideally the enhancement of positive traits in the long term, has also been the goal of medical genetics, from Madge Macklin forward. Medical geneticists have seen nothing wrong with population improvement so long as it didn’t trump the relief of suffering; on the contrary, they have believed that relief of suffering through the prevention of hereditary disease would lead to the gradual elimination of disease and human betterment. Eugenics, in short, was not wrong; it was just done wrong. Are we ready to come to terms with that view?

“Your Future Together” is not eugenic, then, if by “eugenics” you mean state-mandated compulsory reproductive behavior. It veers pretty close at points, but ultimately it aims, imperfectly, at giving individuals access to information and permitting informed reproductive decisions.

However, most medical eugenicists and medical geneticists have hewed to a more inclusive, Galtonian definition of eugenics, in which education is the preferred means of achieving both the the short-term relief of individual suffering and the long-term goal of human improvement. Eugenics and medical genetics have always shared these two aims. And this to me is the central dilemma of contemporary genetic medicine.

Rocinante Rides Again: Intelligent Design Redux

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Over at The Loom, the science writer Carl Zimmer is taking a turn at bat against the creationists. In a thoughtful, nicely written 4-part series, he recounts his experience trying to engage Intelligent Design advocate David Klinghoffer and pin him down on the evidence for his view, and provides an excellent summary of some of the chromosomal evidence for our evolutionary split from the higher apes. Zimmer is characteristically succinct, clear, and entertaining, but he’s tilting at windmills: The argument isn’t really about science.

Zimmer has been asking for even a shred of actual evidence that evolution can’t have happened, and of course the folks at The BioLogic Institute (the new entity of the Discovery Institute) are hemming, heeing, and hawing–cherry-picking quotes from 10 year old papers, masking data behind paywalls, twisting and massaging facts until they seem to say what they want them to. It’s like trying to talk seriously to a 9 year-old playground bully: they’re interested only in winning the argument, not in serious inquiry, and they use any rhetorical technique they need to do so.

As I argued in The Panda’s Black Box, this is just what you’d expect. The ID movement is patently an offspring of American creationism (which Ron Numbers shows irrefutably in his superb history, The Creationists). The last time we saw these folks was in Dover, PA, in 2006. But there is a new ID text, Science and Human Origins, and the ID folks are shilling it. It may seem strange that this would pop up now, of all times. We’ve never had more evidence for evolution and human origins. But such moments are always when we have a new wave of anti-evolutionism. Also, the country’s political center has never been farther right. Although it claims to deal in the realm of scientific evidence, ID is one of the things that science doesn’t explain (or in this case, explain away). Intelligent Design is not about evidence.

How can that be, given all the scientific “evidence” they throw around? I mean that ID is about the cultural authority of science, not about science itself. It’s about fear of the godless Dawkinsian world Darwinists advocate, and about the dominance of science–and especially biology–in our world today. The IDers use science to fight science–they have taken up the weapon of their “oppressors” because they too recognize that science is the most powerful weapon today. Intelligent Design is superficially scientific anti-science–a tacit, ironic vindication of the power of the scientific worldview.

I actually have some sympathy for that view—and that sympathy makes my small intestine clench, because I disagree with the IDers on just about every point of policy and social theory. I do not agree with the means the IDers employ and I certainly don’t agree with the worldview they espouse (however coyly). I’m as godless as they come.

But I too have a critique of science and particularly biomedicine as the dominant cultural force in our society. Science has an enormous amount of power in our society–rightwingnuts notwithstanding–and I take part of my job to be being nervous about that. Science and technology have done much to improve our quality of life, but it does not have a good track record as a basis for social policy. So I defend science against irrationality, but I criticize its cultural hegemony. Dissent is the sincerest form of  cheerleading.

We should stop engaging the IDers on issues of science. They’re not interested in sincere inquiry–it’s bound to be fruitless. And it’s not what the argument is about, anyway. What we need to worry about is that textbook. If the rightwingnuts get their way and teach American children their medieval worldview, their other great concern–the Decline of America–will only accelerate. America will be to Europe and Asia what Mississippi and Kansas are to America.

The way to disarm the IDers is to dismount Rocinante and contextualize this movement. History, not science, provides the explanation.

 

Nice Review

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Just got this nice review of The Science of Human Perfection in Publishers’ Weekly!

Here’s the link, and here’s the text:

In this intriguing history of medical genetics, Comfort, associate professor of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins, makes a bold and rather uncomfortable assertion: that together with the compassionate drive to reduce individual suffering, the eugenic drive to improve the biological trajectory of the human race overall has always been central to the practice of genetic medicine, despite attempts to separate the discipline from its racist reputation after WWII. Comfort supports his assertion through carefully tracing the development of ideas about heritability and how they became manifest in academic, medical, and governmental contexts in America from the early 1900s to the present. Two strains of thought in particular come together: the Garrodian influence, focused on individual biochemical variation and the interaction between a particular patient’s natural constitution and environment; and the Galtonian influence, tracing traits across large populations, with a focus on social implications and human engineering. As we move from treating manifest disease to predictive and preventative medicine based on “latent disease” detected only in an individual’s genes, Comfort provides some complex food for thought about the balance between creating good for individuals and for the human species, and about the ways we define the methods we use.

Eugenics, past and future

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In today’s New York Times, Ross Douthat writes about Irving Fisher and Progressive-era eugenics, comparing it to today’s “liberal eugenics.” His faith in universal human goodness may be questioned, but he is right about the fundamental similarities between eugenics old and new. This–including Fisher–is the subject of chapter 2 of The Science of Human Perfection.

Who’s afraid of the neuroscience of politics? I am.

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So I’m reading Chris Mooney’s The Republican Brain and I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it once I’m finished. Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell don’t seem to have read Mooney’s book either, but they did read a recent article by Mooney in HuffPost, summarizing his argument, and boy, did it make them mad. Mooney then gave a guest spot to his pal the behavioral psychologist Andrea Kuszewski, who served up a characteristically fiery and entertaining riposte called, “Who’s afraid of the neuroscience of politics?”, defending behavioral psychology, journalism, and liberal politics against the anti-anti-conservatism of Berezow and Campbell. Kuszewski answers her own question thus: “From the looks of things, it appears to be conservative journalists.” But I’m afraid of the neuroscience of politics, and I’m no conservative journalist. In fact, I’m a liberal historian of science and medicine (with, fwiw, graduate training in neuroscience).

Let me be clear at the outset: if I’m on anyone’s side in this debate, either rhetorically or politically, it’s Mooney and Kuszewski. I am appalled at the assault on knowledge and the way ignorance has become a viable political stance in this country. But as a good Enlightenment liberal, I believe in critique as a means of advancing understanding. And I’m personally vested in honing our arguments and developing our understanding as much as possible. I’m making this argument in the interest of rational, constructive discussion with the likes of Mooney and Kuszewski, not out of any allegiance to right-wing ideologues.

Berezow and Campbell are the authors of the forthcoming book, Science Left Behind, a counterweight to Mooney’s thoughtful, impassioned thesis about the anti-scientific tendencies of the American political right wing. Left-wing opponents of vaccines, GM food, and nuclear power are anti-science too, Berezow and Campbell argue; conservatives don’t have a monopoly on ideologically driven opposition to politically charged scientific issues. If Berezow and Campbell had read Mooney’s book, they’d have seen that he addresses each of those issues himself; further, there’s light-years’ difference intellectually between opposition to GM food and rejection of evolution or, for Christ’s sake, relativity. So the counterweight is really a duck on the other side of the scales from the accused witch; if the pans seem to balance, it says more about the experiment than about nature.

Anyway, in their article, Berezow and Campbell accuse Mooney of being dilettante, a philistine, a charlatan, a mountebank, and possibly a mummer and a picador, although I don’t want to read too deeply into their argument. They make lots of positively silly statements, such as that as a (mere) journalist, Mooney can “practice scientific malpractice with impunity.” Though that is literally true, rhetorically it is really a high-handed slap at those who would deign to write about science without holding a Ph.D. in microbiology, as does Berezow. Which is amusing, given that his coauthor Campbell edits Science 2.0, a website whose home page offers, “Know science and want to write? Register now to get your own column!”, and which, on the About Us page, says, “We created a place where everyone who wants to write about science can write to a large potential audience, regardless of popularity.”

It is, then, overall a dopey article, irrational and ill-informed, whose flaws Kuszewski enumerates and I don’t need to repeat. However, Berezow and Campbell almost make an interesting criticism. They say that Mooney’s argument—that there is a biological underpinning to conservativism—amounts to eugenics. Now taken literally, this is idiotic. Eugenics has been defined in many ways over the last 130 years, viz.:

    • “The study of the agencies under social control, that improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally” (Galton, 1883)
    • “The science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race” (Pearson, 1904)
    • “The science of human improvement by better breeding” (Davenport, 1910)
    • “The self-direction of human evolution” (Eugenics Congress, 1921)

All of them in some way imply a program of human hereditary improvement. As far as I can tell, Mooney offers us no plan for reducing the numbers of Republicans, the way Harry Laughlin had a plan for reducing the numbers of the feebleminded. More’s the pity, depending on your point of view, but anyway.

Still, in a slightly deranged way, there is a hint of a point here. I do find the search for the biological basis of political belief disturbing. I have no doubt that such a basis exists, but, taking the long view, the quest for it raises concerns. Ironically, I’m worried that Mooney and Kuszewski will, indirectly and in the long term, be feeding the enemy.

The search for the psychological and genetic basis of social behavior has a long history. It goes back to Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, the father of modern biostatistics, and the coiner of the term “eugenics.” Galton considered himself a good liberal, but his aims horrify right-thinking left-wingers today. He sought to implement, “under existing conditions of law and sentiment,” a system that would encourage the “best” (wealthy, educated, and successful) members of British society to have more children and the “worst” to have fewer. Galton cared about populations, not individuals. And for him, the potency of cold scientific logic overruled any wuzzle-headed sentimentality on behalf of those who were to be “selected against.”

Galton is in fact one of the gentler figures in this history. For the most part, he was opposed to coercive regulation of reproduction except when a person was so incapacitated he could not rationally make his own decisions. He was swayed from this view late in life, after 1900, when the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws led to a newly hardline coercive style of eugenics in the Progressive era, notoriously leading to dozens of sterilization laws, influencing immigration policy, and otherwise providing a powerful social weapon to be used against the poor, sick, foreign, black, female, and undereducated.

One of the leading figures of Progressive era eugenics was the psychologist Henry Goddard, of the Vineland Training School in New Jersey. Goddard was reasonably well-educated and a respected member of the professional psychological community. He introduced “idiot,” “imbecile,” and “moron,” to the lexicon, as scientifically precise and morally compassionate categories for individuals of mental defect. Through years of study of his mentally impaired students, he became convinced that he had found evidence for a Mendelian recessive gene for “feeblemindedness.” That such a gene existed was widely accepted, common knowledge among psychologists for decades. Goddard’s best-known work was “The Kallikaks,” which traced in thrilling detail the exploits of a “race of defective degenerates,” a highly inbred genealogy of crooks, murderers, prostitutes, good-for-nothings, and fools. Goddard was an ardent eugenicist and he set up an IQ testing station at Ellis Island to keep out mental defectives—who mostly turned out to be merely illiterate or simply people who didn’t speak English.

One could go on. There’s the psychologist Arthur Jensen’s 1969 study purporting to show, with good hard scientific data, that blacks are about 10-20 IQ points stupider than whites, so it was pointless for liberals to provide “compensatory education” designed to right past wrongs of separate but unequal education; there’s the XYY debate, during which it was briefly “proved” that having an extra Y chromosome makes you big, scary, and prone to violent crime; there’s Murray and Herrnstein’s 1994 conservative scientific bombshell The Bell Curve, which pretty much just rehearsed Galton, Goddard, Cyril Burt, and Jensen but triggered a large public debate over science and conservative politics.

The point is, efforts to explain human social behavior in terms of their genes and their brains have provided more ammunition to social conservatives than to social liberals. Explanations of complex social behavior in terms of the innate serve those in power more than they serve the forces of change. And they do so regardless of how much you couch your case in terms of “nature and nurture,” saying, “We know it’s not all nature; it’s just that we’re interested here in the nature side of things” (for a haunting example of this rhetorical strategy, read the opening chapters of The Bell Curve).

Science has a complex role in our society, as multifarious as the relationship between knowledge and power. When science is pitted against ignorance, I defend science with the spirit of the righteous. But when science is used to protect the status quo, to serve stockholders, or to serve the population at the expense of the individual—when science conflicts with my liberal values—I oppose it. My concern here is that while ostensibly defending science against ignorance, arguments such as this will inadvertently lend arms to those attacking the subaltern.

I’m afraid of the neuroscience of politics, then, because politics is about power. Because I’m a liberal, and liberalism today aims to take the side of those without power—it aims to equalize power. Because science, too, is at least partly about power, and so it has a complex relationship to liberalism that I don’t want to see glossed over. And because historically, explanations of complex social behavior in terms of innate biological characteristics have tended to serve those in power—the white, male, wealthy, and Protestant.

In today’s categories, Republicans.

 

Further Reading:

Beckwith, J., and L. Miller. “The XYY Male: The Making of a Myth.” Harv Mag 79, no. 2 (1976): 30–3.

Comfort, Nathaniel. “Zelig (recent Biographies of Francis Galton).” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 80, no. 2 (2006): 348–363.

Cowan, Ruth. “Nature and Nurture: The Interplay of Biology and Politics in the Work of Francis Galton.” In Studies in the History of Biology, 133–208. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

Davenport, Charles. Eugenics: The Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding. New York: Henry Holt, 1910.

Elseviers, D. “The Criminal XYY Chromosomes: Fact or Fiction.” Sci People 6, no. 5 (1974): 22–4.

Fox, Richard G. “The XYY Offender: A Modern Myth?” The Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science 62, no. 1 (1971): 59–73.

Fraser, Steve. The Bell Curve Wars : Race, Intelligence, and the Future of America. New York: BasicBooks, 1995.

Galton, Francis. Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences. London: Macmillan and Co., 1869. file://localhost/Volumes/NCREFS/PDFs/3331.pdf.

Gillham, Nicholas W. A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics. New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Herrnstein, Richard J., and Charles A. Murray. The Bell Curve : Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. New York: Free Press, 1994.

Jacoby, Russell, and Naomi Glauberman. The Bell Curve Debate. New York: Random House, 1995.

Jensen, Arthur. “How Much Can We Boost Scholastic Achievement?” Harvard Educational Review 39 (1969): 1–123.

Kevles, Daniel J. In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. http://books.google.com/books?id=8esnhRxBomMC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA329#v=onepage&q&f=false.

Kincheloe, Joe L., Shirley R. Steinberg, and Aaron David Gresson. Measured Lies : The Bell Curve Examined. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.

Lewontin, Richard. “Race and Intelligence.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 26, no. 3 (1970): 2–8.

Pearson, Karl. The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton. Vol. 3. Cambridge [Eng.]: University press, 1930. http://galton.org/pearson/.

Steinfels, M. O., and C. Levine. “The XYY Controversy: Researching Violence and Genetics.” Hastings Cent Rep 10, no. 4 (1980): Suppl 1–32.

Galton’s work, as well as much scholarly commentary on Galton, is collected at http://galton.org.

Genetic determinism round-up

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It’s been a busy week for genetic oversell.

Benjamin et al. examined the genetic architecture of economic and political preferences in PNAS. They conclude that “molecular-genetic-based heritability estimates…partially corroborate evidence of significant heritability from behavior genetic studies,” i.e., there is some evidence from molecules that there is some evidence from behavior genetics that political preference is genetic. And also, their analyses “suggest that these traits have a polygenic architecture, with the heritable variation explained by many genes with small effects,” i.e. that although behavior is mediated by proteins and therefore somehow involves genes, there is no single gene for being a bleeding liberal or an evangelical Republican.

Chris Mooney discussed the paper, recognizing that “finding a single ‘liberal gene’ or ‘conservative gene’ just ain’t gonna happen. The studies that we’ve heard about so far focusing on individual “political” genes may be suspect, and much larger samples will be needed. In all likelihood, there isn’t going to be any one gene that does a lot of work to explain ideology–the phenomenon is going to be polygenic…and very tough to study.”

All true, but we need to go deeper than this. Since the middle of last century it has been clear that there is no single gene for any complex behavioral trait. Granted, the headlines continue to scream this stuff (see below), but we need to go beyond refuting simple genetic determinism. The larger question is why the genetics of politics gets so much play, when all it concludes ultimately is that lots of genes plus lots of other stuff go into complex qualities of temperament.

A minor dust-up over personal genomics raised similar issues. Over at The Awl, Russell Brandom wrote a trenchant critique of personal genome tests. He points out that items on a personal genome screen such as, “Your odds of heroin addiction are 2.9X higher than average” are hard to interpret. Does he get a bigger than average reward from opiates and so is more likely to keep doing them if he tries them? Or does he get less reward, and so would have to do more and more to keep the sensation?

He points out that a large percentage of a low risk is still a low risk. Going from a 2.4% risk to a 3.2% risk doesn’t mean much for the average person. The public health geneticist Tony Holtzman has been collecting data and making this argument since the early days of PKU, sickle cell, and Tay Sachs screening in the 1970s and 1980s, and it’s still true.

Complex traits have many contributing factors, each of which contributes a tiny fraction of the total variation. No one argues this, not even 23AndMe. However, the fashionable emphasis on genes—the dizzying fact that we can now identify a gene that contributes, say, to IQ, or to left-handedness, or for crying out loud to a preference for pork, enhances the genetic component, making it seem more important.

“They don’t have any straightforward truths to offer users,” Brandom observes, “just a flood of vague and often frightening ambiguities. But wherever there’s a gap between what they promise and what they can deliver, 23andme fills it with social media.” All the Facebook- and Foursquare-style features are designed, of course, to keep users on the 23AndMe site, to create a sense of identity and community.

There’s nothing illegitimate about that, but there is something insidious. To the extent that one buys in to this scene, one enters Gene World, where your genes are You. Your identity is determined by your DNA. The complexity of gene-environment interactions that every sane person acknowledges is stripped away, and we slide back to the genetic equivalent of the Ptolemaic earth-centered cosmos: a simplistic, gene-centered universe that seems to account for more than it does.

Misha Angrist responded to Brandom with an impassioned and well-informed defense of genetic testing, in which he pointed out ways in which he has indeed gotten useful information from his genome. He brings up one of the best examples: BRCA1. No argument that knowing your BRCA1 status is useful; however, for cost and other reasons it is not recommended to have yourself tested for BRCA1 unless you have a family history of breast cancer. However, Angrist’s argument that some genetic testing is medically useful does not really refute Brandom’s central claims, that DTC testing risks over-simplifying and overselling the genetic basis of disease and personality.

Razib Khan then totted up the score and decided that personal genomics won this round. It’s not clear why. He emphasizes that a “non-trivial minority of people receive actionable information” from personal genomics—although by his own estimate, 90–99% of those who undergo thise sort of testing will not receive useful medical information—and that the recreational side of personal genomics deserves to be explored. Again, his points are valid but not salient as criticisms of Brandom’s piece.

The comments under Khan’s brief post are more interesting. Several readers seemed to put their arms round each other’s shoulders and say, “Why is everyone always hating on personal genomics?” They saw no reason to do so unless you were an anti-determinist, which they used the way an evangelical uses “pro-choice.” They suggest that skepticism of personal genomics reflects a lack of curiosity and even, bizarrely, a lack of interest in participating in scientific research. One reader suggested that authors such as Brandom who are skeptical of DTC testing are “wedded to a Blank Slate view” and “ideologically oppose any form of genetic determinism.”

It is, rather, the ideology of genetic determinism that Brandom and I and others are concerned about: the troubling attitude that anyone who is wary of some of the implications of molecular soothsaying must be an extreme environmental determinist. Paired with a refusal to consider ways in which, unchecked, the profit motive may corrupt the dissemination of medical data, this is a dangerous view.

There are good reasons to be skeptical of DTC genome testing, and those reasons have nothing to do with one’s general support of science, one’s curiosity, or one’s interest in genetics. DTC genome testing is a large and potent social experiment. It has already brought some benefits, and we can expect it to bring more. However, it also has associated risks, which can and sometimes do mitigate those benefits.

Let me just take two examples, which in my mind encompass many of the smaller criticisms and risks. First, there is a creeping genetic determinism in much of the information on the relationship between genes and disease and behavior. This occurs at several levels. First, it’s worth contemplating why papers like the Benjamin et al. article even get published. There’s a man-bites-dog quality to them. Consider the converse, a paper that purported to show that political and economic preferences had a cultural basis. Ho-hum. But if you find a gene that correlates with such a complex “trait” you have a paper in PNAS. In other words, novelty creates a kind of ascertainment bias that makes it easy to think genes are more important than they are. A slight lapse in one’s critical thinking is all it takes to go from that paper to thinking, “Political and economic preferences just are genetic.” That’s a risk.

That risk is magnified by the publication process, from article authorship all the way to headline-writers. At each step, the contrast of the conceptual image is enhanced, in order to attract the notice of readers. Eventually, you end up with blog posts entitled, “Your IQ depends on a single gene,” and “Can a single pill save your marriage?” While everyone up to speed on genetics understands it doesn’t no, it can’t—that many genes and many environmental variables contribute to any complex biological trait—that complexity tends to get lost when the information is translated into accessible language.

Or consider 23AndMe’s page on “variation.” Using physical performance as an example, they begin modestly:

What does it take to become an Olympic champion? Hard work and perseverance are no doubt part of the equation, but DNA may play a role too.

Nothing to argue with there. The next paragraph introduces ACTN3, alpha-actinin skeletal muscle isoform 3, a protein associated with so-called “fast-twitch” muscle fibers. One form of ACTN3 has been correlated with stellar athletic performance. Its role in athletic performance, the 23AndMe page continues, “has led some to dub it the ‘gene for speed.’” Who is this “some”? Some scientists? Some journalists? Some nutjob bloggers? Some evidence.

At any rate, the page continues in a sweet vein, noting a long-jumper with two non-working copies of ACTN3 as a “testament to the fact that genes are not destiny.”

But the page concludes by asking, “Want to know if you have the ‘gene for speed’? 23andMe’s Health and Traits reports can tell you what versions of the ACTN3 gene you have in your DNA. You can also learn about how your genes may influence a variety of other traits, including your risk for certain diseases. Join 23andMe now!”

The potential customer is left with a clear if implicit message that there is a gene for speed and that for $299 you can find out if you have it. The discussion of variation and the importance of training and other factors is lost.

Where it gets lost, not surprisingly, is in the sales pitch, which brings up my second risk: commercialization. 23AndMe is not a charity. Although I have no reason to doubt the humanitarian impulses of anyone at the company, it’s no secret that their first allegiance is to their shareholders. Their primary task is making money. This of course does not immediately invalidate it as a socially beneficial enterprise, but it does and should make us alert to potential conflicts between profit and benevolence. As an advocate for patients, one feels responsible for raising questions and maintaining transparency so that the medical benefits Angrist rightly emphasizes don’t get lost in the commercialism Brandom exposes.

DTC testing is a fascinating, perhaps revolutionary development in medicine. It democratizes medical diagnostics, putting the first step in prevention and treatment into patients’ hands. It has the potential to empower patients, and thus to begin to counter the twentieth-century trend toward an ever more hierarchical healthcare establishment, in which objectification of the patient was justified on grounds of therapeutic potency. DTC testing may be one of those developments that medical historians a century hence will note as pivotal, the beginning of a new model of more participatory healthcare.

Advocates of DTC testing need to address concerns about hype, creeping genetic determinism, and commercialization in order for DTC testing to flourish. Waving away critics as anti-intellectual, anti-science, or blindly ideological merely deepens concerns about overselling this potentially transformative technology.