Limelight:

It's all in the genes

By Lubna Abdel-Aziz

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What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice everything nice
What are little boys made of?
Snips and snails and puppy dogs' tails

A charming little ditty as a children's nursery rhyme, but for centuries it was as good an answer as any as to what we are made of! As long as the homo-sapien has existed, he has searched for the elements and factors that go into his creation. It is only in the second half of the last century that scientists seem to have figured it out. We are made up of trillions of cells, millions of genes and 46 chromosomes. Each cell holds an amazing two metres of "deoxyribonucleic acid" known as DNA. It has been estimated that "if the entire DNA contained within the cells of a single human being was stretched out, it would reach to the moon and back eight thousand times!"

Each one of our genes acts as a template for making a protein, and it is proteins that are responsible for running this magnificent engine of ours. The Human Genome Project, launched in 1990, has worked out the full DNA sequence, uncovering not only the nature and many of our genes, but their purpose, function and many of their characteristics. Such milestones are reason for great pride in scientific circles, propelling "genes" to super-star status of the decade. Their greatest asset is their capacity to help us eliminate disease.

Genes seem to be the reason and excuse for many of our ills. Not only are they responsible for what we look like, how we behave, when we live, when we die, our jobs, diseases, spouses and children, but now they are also being blamed for all our misfortunes. Such a theory seems to stretch the realm of credibility, but according to geneticist Robert Plomin of the London Institute of Psychiatry "not only is genetic influence on personality significant, but unlike anything else we ever saw, it's substantial."

The fault dear Brutus is not in our stars but in ourselves, for we are underlings
-- Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

Reflections upon our genetic make-up arise following the publication of Edward Klein's best-selling novel The Kennedy Curse. Klein attributes this "Kennedy" curse to a "combination of classical hubris and modern genetics". The book has been on the New York best-seller list for months, and arguments for and against his theory abound. In response to his critics for dishing the dirt on the Kennedys, Klein contends that there must be such a thing as a "thrill-seeking gene" that all the Kennedys possess, his reasoning being the presence of excessive release of dopamine in the brain, rendering them arrogant and defiant. The Kennedys are subject to great misfortunes he explains, because they have a lust for excitement. Impetuous thrill-seekers, they are born with a self-destructive predisposition that puts them always in the line of tragedy. This causes them to be ruthless and therefore prone to accidents and mishaps. Are we responsible for nothing, our genes responsible for everything?

How convenient. I decided to brush up on my genome manifesto. We may indeed be slaves to our passion. Hamlet cried:

Give me that man
That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
In my heart's core

Our genes carry the blueprint of all our traits -- intelligence, illness, mental disabilities, and any other form of abnormality. Are the Kennedys truly cursed, or is it the size of their clan, their extraordinary wealth and achievements, their fame and fortune that places them under the glare of the limelight. Their propensity for taking risks however may be an inherited trait. The book contains juicy gossip surrounding the marriage of John Kennedy Jr and Carolyn Bessette. Klein claims that Bessette was a hot-tempered cocaine addict who was abusive to her husband and remained in a relation with her lover even after her engagement to John Kennedy Jr. John Jr had no business flying the plane with a broken leg in a thick fog following a terrible fight with his wife, adding more senseless deaths to the string of tragedies that have befallen the Kennedys. Are we masters of our fate, or helplessly guided by deformed genes leading us to the brink of disaster? Our dispositions, like our constitutions, are to a significant degree, inherited.

It was clear that there were inherited characteristics between parent and child and man has continually struggled to explain what we are made of. The Greek philosopher Theophrates proposed that male flowers cause female flowers to ripen! Hippocrates, the first personality theorist, speculated that "seeds" were produced by various parts of the body and transmitted to offspring at the time of conception. Aristotle thought that male and female seeds were mixed at conception.

It was only during the 1700s that the Dutch microscopist Anton van Leewenbock (1632-1723) discovered "animalculus" in the sperm of humans and other animals. Other scientists saw "a little man" inside each sperm and called it "homunculus". These scientists were known as the "spermists". Opposing this view came from the "ovists" who believed the human was in the eggs carried by women containing "girl" and "boy" children. Blending the theories of spermists and ovists during the 19th century resulted in the belief that a blend of both is what little girls and boys are made of. But blending theories ignore characteristics that skip a generation only to reappear later.

This was left to Charles Darwin (1809-1882). In his theory of evolution, Darwin suggested that the science of the 1800s had not yet found the correct answer to heredity. That came from a contemporary of Darwin though Darwin never knew of his work.

He was the Austrian monk, Gregor Mendel (1822 -- 1884) whose experiments with the breeding of garden peas established the fundamental principles that led to the development of the modern science of genetics. Mendel concluded that plant traits are handed down through heredity and that each plant receives a pair of egg cells for each trait, one from each parent. These forms called "alleles" may be either identical or different. If different, one will be "dominant" with obvious visible effects, the other "recessive" with hidden effects. Mendel's results were published in 1866 but remained unnoticed and therefore unknown to Darwin. Three decades later, in 1900 scientists recognised the importance of Mendel's work establishing him as the father of the theory of heredity, now known as genetics -- the passing of characteristics from parent to offspring.

The word gene was coined in 1930 by Wilhelm Johannsen to describe the "Mendellian" factors of heredity, derived from the Greek word genos meaning birth. A star was born and since then "genes" have dominated the scientific horizon and spawned many other scientific terms such as genetics, genomics, etc. Deciphering the human genome has the potential to dramatically improve human health, but it also has raised a number of legal, ethical and moral issues that will remain controversial for many years to come. While delighting in the attributes of genetic engineering and its positive potential to cure man's myriad illnesses, we have reservations about reckless use of the power of the human brain. As in the case of the discovery of the atom, the wisdom is to move with caution and know where to draw the line. Sometimes it takes more courage to withdraw than to move forward.

So what are little girls and boys made of? Are they soon to get rid of all their abnormal genes, to become perfect super human beings, excessively beautiful, intelligent and successful, devoid of shortcomings and drawbacks -- no flaws, no misfortunes, no tragedies!?

As for me, I think we are made of trillions of feelings, millions of emotions, thousands of moods, hundreds of temperaments and tens of passions that make up all our tears and laughter, and that is what Big girls and boys are made of!

Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 2 - 8 October 2003 (Issue No. 658)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/658/pe2.htm