So, I’ve started reading again: The Gene

I’m not a science kinda person but I binge read “The Gene: An Intimate History” by Siddhartha Mukherjee and it was an amazing first read in a long time. It was a delight to read the work of someone with deep expertise and passion in their subject, a scientist with enlightening substance who can communicate it effectively in beautiful narratives. Mukherjee translated and consolidated the scientific jargon of the basic unit of hereditary information into stories that provided a new angle to the way I had thought about identity.

A few overarching thematic things that struck me:

1. Power of making association. Mendel and Darwin, and the multitude of names between, filled the gap between genetics and biology; a scientist who studies and collects flies from mountains and a blind guy mathematically working out the placement of genes had discoveries that combined theory and experiment and lead to a breakthrough in discovering genetic code. Even throughout the book itself, Mukherjee punctuates each chapter with quotes and insights from literature and philosophy – an intersection between science and humanities. What stood out to me about his writing, as well as the discovery of the gene, was how the crossing of discipline and the ability to draw links was crucial to progress.
2. Importance of isolation. Paradoxically, the collaboration was only effective when applied with the principle of isolation. When results are separated in distance, in disciplines, scientific discoveries can remain unaffected by biases and groupthink. The profile of all those scientists who had contributed to the search for the genetic code placement, for example, came from different countries, and science moved forward cold-heartedly and unhampered by issues like Spanish flu or political upheaval because there was more than one group of scientists preoccupied with the study of inheritance. Working apart works once someone is able to cross information between disciplines, maybe after being inspired at some prestigious scientific forum (testament to the pros of human collaboration).
3. Diversity. One thing that Mukherjee tried to hammer home was that mutant is not bad as it provides deep genetic diversity that allows a species to choose what is best for survival. Mutant – it’s determined by the compatibility of the match between mutant to the environment or context. Interestingly, anaemia (sickle cell), usually viewed as a disease, is an adaptation to survive fatal malaria infections endemic in African communities. Another example would be Cystic Fibrosis, where high numbers of carriers within Northern European lineages could be a result of adaptation to the harsh conditions of the environment during the Bronze Age. Eugenics, or any form of prejudice that kills diversity based on one particular yardstick for measuring what is desirable will be detrimental to evolution. Mukherjee used a cute analogy: think of a boxer with crooked nose, who is genetically superior and fitter, but is unable to pass on his genetic information because the hypothetical society he lives in judges everyone’s desirability by how straight their nose is.
4. The existence of free will. Genetics lends a lot to philosophical musings about the deterministic universe. In a particular type of worm, C. Elegans, cellular biography could be mapped out because of the simplicity of its genetic makeup, and everything every cell does is pre-determined. If, by extension, humans operate in a similar concept, every single one of our cells from their lives to death is dictated by a gene’s recipe, so then what becomes of our fate and our agency if the parts that make us up have predestined paths? It almost seems as though free-will cannot exist, but interestingly, when all the cells are put together (as in the case of a complex system of a human) what matters isn’t that each gene carries an instruction, but that the interaction within them can cancel or amplify each other’s functions. We become even more unpredictable due to the sheer volume of permutations that exist, and hence our choices do push even the limits of our biology.

A few interesting scientific concepts that struck me:

1. Delphic boat. What makes a boat a boat? It’s not the individual parts that defines something (like the wooden planks) but the way it is put together that matters. In other words, our identity is tied to the blueprint of what makes us, us. While whatever natural resources we have can make us more suitable for certain tasks, it is only through our actions and the cumulation of the sum of our parts that shape us. (Nurture > Nature!!)
2. If our ACTG lettering of DNA was a book … it’d be 1.5 million A4 pages worth of just some combination of ACTG. Imagine writing a thesis paper that is 5000 words long and struggling to fill it meaningfully, except it’s a whole code for build-a-human and it’s infinitely longer than we can imagine. It’s a good reminder to not waste our lives away because our DNA put in so much effort to make us this functioning scrabble of letters and nobody likes a professor who throws a student’s magnum opus to a side and never read it to its full potential.
3. Mitochondrial eve – Our mitochondria are all cousins of each other because we all came from one of the first African females. Apparently there is some data that can only be passed down through gender-linked chromosomes so if the initial few female homo sapiens gave birth to all males then their genetic code will be gone for good and if this isn’t the biggest slap in the face to all those chauvinistic “sons are better” ideas then I don’t know what is.
4. Epigenetics, even our genes have memories. There is this group of people especially prone to obesity because their ancestors 3 generations before them went through a famine and those who lived on to pass their genetic code to their offspring has cells adapted to hold on to alarmingly high amounts of nutrients from food. The fact that even our genes remember things that we have never experienced before, or that many of us have inherited a baggage from our ancestors’ trauma, seems like such a wild idea.

A few points of contention and discussion:

1. Science being used by politics. The earliest way it has been abused systemically is with Nazi’s eugenics programme. Identity became interlinked with politics, quite literally a gene-ocide, and Mengele’s screwed up twin studies also shows how genetic correspondence dictates a lot of the similarity in personality/physicality. America followed it up with their version of eugenics: classifying people being “stupid”, “moron”, or an “imbecile” and sterilising them. Not only does it become a tool for the elite to protect their interests, it eventually evolved into racial politics nowadays, very much a parallel to Nazis “Aryan Race”. Interestingly, our genes are more colour-blind than us and it is impossible to tell our races apart genetically; in fact, we are more alike between different races and more genetically diverse among the same racial group. It immediately struck me how identity politics is quite literally inescapable when it is written into our genetic code. If anything, the few forays into eugenics points to the dangers of politicising science (or anything for that matters) lest we wish to end up like the society in “Brave New World”. Especially because science carries with it a stamp of credibility for possessing factual information, and when politics misuse it as a basis of their policies it makes it difficult to challenge when they could rebut anything with “but science said it’s true”.
2. Is sexual orientation a choice? According to genes it’s not because the laws of attraction is quite literally written into our code. The SRY genes, for example, leaves XY chromosomes in a female body that can manifest in later physical developments or conflicting gender identity expression (someone who is biologically female but genetically male?). Or for example, the gene Xq28 is traced in all gay men and could potentially be a gene that dictates sexual orientation. Honestly this is a highly contentious topic and the natural instinct is to shut up and not take a stance but this proves that genetic disposition affects our identity, even our orientation, much like how twin studies prove that genetics do affect personality and choice of marriage partners. Proving this scientifically isn’t the answer to end discrimination either because there will always be a flat earther/anti-vaxxer to whatever scientific discovery made. Science has always been blasphemous and offensive to the ruling ideologies, so just like how it took a while for Darwin’s theory of evolution to be accepted, it will be awhile before we are able to view sexuality as any other traits dictated by our genes like height, or ability to roll our tongues.
3. The moral question in scientific discoveries. The discovery of genetic engineering was likened to the discovery of the atomic bomb in the scale of its impact, and hence the Berg moratorium on how not to abuse scientific breakthroughs: don’t put toxin, drug resistant or cancer into e.coli. So long as there is uncertainty in how an invention will affect the status quo, we cannot go forward partly because we are afraid of implications, but also because we are afraid of the division it will cause people (see the Conference of Asilomar). Perhaps there is also our fear of irreversibility at play here, afraid that whatever we introduce will be left to multiply without our control once we introduce it, free to be abused or develop in a way that we cannot take back. A lot of times scientific discovery is made in isolation from the moral dimension, as most of the experts on genetic engineering were more concerned with biohazards than the moral implications of genetic engineering. That isn’t really the fault of the scientific community, but simply because it is difficult to come up with moral codes (at what stage of the embryo’s development do we consider it wrong to abort/edit it) and to enforce it (see He Jiankui who created the first genetically altered twin). However, I think that because it is such a difficult task all the more we should engage in the arduous discussion so that accompanying progress in science, we can also see a development in responsibility. Borrowing from the Delphic boat idea, maybe progress is not defined by reaching a conclusion, but by the processes it takes to arrive at many points of view and having that conversation in the first place.