The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles

by Bruce H. Lipton

Of course there is no doubt that some diseases, like Huntington’s chorea, beta thalassemia, and cystic fibrosis, can be blamed entirely on one faulty gene. But single-gene disorders affect less than 2 percent of the population; the vast majority of people come into this world with genes that should enable them to live a happy and healthy life. The diseases that are today’s scourges—diabetes, heart disease, and cancer—short circuit a happy and healthy life. These diseases, however, are not the result of a single gene, but of complex interactions among multiple genes and environmental factors. What about all those headlines trumpeting the discovery of a gene for everything from depression to schizophrenia? Read those articles closely and you’ll see that behind the breathless headline is a more sober truth. Scientists have linked lots of genes to lots of different diseases and traits, but scientists have rarely found that one gene causes a trait or a disease. In the realm of human diseases, defective genes acting alone only account for about 2 percent of our total disease load. (Strohman 2003) The confusion occurs when the media repeatedly distort the meaning of two words: correlation and causation. It’s one thing to be linked to a disease; it’s quite another to cause a disease, which implies a directing, controlling action.