Always a Good Excuse

Studying pea plants during the years around 1860, Gregor Mendel, a scientist and Augustinian friar at St. Thomas' Abbey in Brno, suggested the presence of discrete inheritable units in nature. He studied inheritance patterns in 8000 varieties, tracking the transfer of identifiable physical characteristics passed down from the parent plants to next generations. Almost 50 years later Wilhelm Johannsen coined the term “gene.” After almost another 50 years Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins use X-ray crystallography to try to detect these inheritable units, leading to Watson and Crick’s discovery of the double-stranded helix DNA molecule.

Today we hear references to genes every day, but the science is still developing. Regardless of that, many people know just enough about genetics and inherited traits to use it as an easy excuse for any fault they don’t want to correct. Genes represent the hand nature has dealt us, and there is nothing we can do to change them – no diet, no exercise, no vitamin, nothing.

This point was made in a book I recently read, The Cure for Everything by Timothy Caulfield. In the introduction to the chapter about genes as health factors, he lists several headlines telling not of the scientific advances in the field, but of how the field has become popularized by promising cures for these immutable factors through some type of gene technology. (These are another variant of the news philosophy that I described back in early March when I wrote Stoking the Fear.)

His list of popular headlines included:

• Is Laziness Gene to Blame for Couch Potatoes?
• The God Gene, Does Our DNA Compel Us to Seek a Higher Power?
• Always Lost? : It May Be in Your Genes
• Party Animal: It May Be in Your Genes
• Marriage Problems?: Husband’s Genes May Be the Problem
• Genes May Affect Popularity, Researchers Say.

Since the book was published in 2012, I thought I could go on line and add to the list of handy  excuses:

• Pity the poor murderer, his genes made him do it
• "Mom gene" discovered in mice: Do you have it?
• "Binge-drinking gene" discovered
• Intelligence genes discovered by scientists
• Sweet-tooth Gene Discovered
• Obesity gene Discovery Could Lead to New Treatments
• Anxiety, Aggression Gene Discovered

So if you are not too bright, overweight due to your sweet tooth, tend to binge drink, are lazy, unfaithful to your spouse, a bad parent, unpopular and may be prone to anxiety or aggression or even more brutal forms of violence, not to worry. It's not your fault; you're not responsible. You can blame it all on your genes, sit back and wait for science to fix you! Of course if the headline, “First 'placebo gene' discovered” applies to you, you don’t even have to wait. With your increased susceptibility to the placebo effect, you can look up the first charlatan or natural medicine guru selling a sham treatment or a miracle cure and talk your self into getting better.

Gene research is important and may lead to some significant progress toward real cures, but so far all these somewhat outrageous health-related headlines are just a distraction. Responsible people don’t go looking for easy excuses.