The Gene: An Intimate History

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

foot man from Denmark and a four-foot man from Demba share the same anatomy, physiology, and biochemistry. Even the two most extreme human variants—male and female—share 99.688 percent of their genes.

When we claim to find “genes for” certain human features or functions, it is by virtue of defining that feature narrowly. It makes sense to define “genes for” blood type or “genes for” height since these biological attributes have intrinsically narrow definitions. But it is an old sin of biology to confuse the definition of a feature with the feature itself. If we define “beauty” as having blue eyes (and only blue eyes), then we will, indeed, find a “gene for beauty.” If we define “intelligence” as the performance on only one kind of problem in only one kind of test, then we wil...

It is nonsense to speak about “nature” or “nurture” in absolutes or abstracts. Whether nature—i.e., the gene—or nurture—i.e., the environment—dominates in the development of a feature or function depends, acutely, on the individual feature and the context. The SRY gene determines sexual anatomy and physiology in a strikingly autonomous manner; it is all nature. Gender identity, sexual preference, and the choice of sexual roles are determined by intersections of genes and environments—i.e., nature plus nurture. The manner in which “masculinity” versus “femininity” is...

Every generation of humans will produce variants and mutants; it is an inextricable part of our biology. A mutation is only “abnormal” in a statistical sense: it is the less common variant. The desire to homogenize and “normalize” humans must be counterbalanced against biological imperatives ...

Every genetic “illness” is a mismatch between an organism’s genome and its environment. In some cases, the appropriate medical intervention to mitigate a disease might be to alter the environment to make it “fit” an organismal form (building alternative architectural realms for those with dwarfism; imagining alternative educational landscapes for children with autism). In other cases, conversely, it might mean changing genes to fit environments. In yet other cases, the match may be impossible to achieve: the severest forms of genetic illnesses, such as those caused by nonfunction of essential genes, are incompatible with all environments. It is a peculiar modern fallacy to imagine that the definitive solution to illness is to change nature—i.e., genes—when the environment is often more malleable.

A triangle of considerations—extraordinary suffering, highly penetrant genotypes, and justifiable interventions—has, thus far, constrained our attempts to intervene on humans. As we loosen the boundaries of this triangle (by changing the standards for “extraordinary suffering” or “justifiable interventions”), we need new biological, cultural, and social precepts to determine which genetic interventions may be permitted or constrained, and the circumstances in which these interventions become safe or permissible.

History repeats itself, in part because the genome repeats itself. And the genome repeats itself, in part because history does. The impulses, ambitions, fantasies, and desires that drive human history are, at least in part, encoded in the human genome. And human history has, in turn, selected genomes that carry these impulses, ambitions, fantasies, and desires. This self-fulfilling circle of logic is responsible for some of the most magnificent and evocative qualities in our species, but also some of the most reprehensible. It is far too much to ask ourselves to escape the orbit of this logic, but recognizing its inherent circularity, and being skeptical of its overreach, might protect the weak from the will of the strong, and the “mutant” from being annihilated by the “normal.”

Perhaps even that skepticism exists somewhere in our twenty-one thousand genes. Perhaps the compassion that such skepticism enables is also encoded indelibly in the human ge...

A whole assembled from the sum of the parts is different from the whole before it was broken into the parts.