What Makes You Who You Are

The perennial debate well-nigh nature and nurturewhich is the much soused shaper of the forgiving essence? is perennially rekindled. It flared up again in the capital of the United Kingdom Observer of Feb. 11, 2001. REVEALED THE SECRET OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR, prove the banner headline. ENVIRONMENT, NOT GENES, KEY TO OUR ACTS. The acknowledgment of the story was Craig Venter, the self-made man of genes who had built a private company to contemplate the full sequence of the world genome in competition with an international consortium funded by taxes and charities.That sequencea string of 3 jillion letters, composed in a four-letter alphabet, containing the complete recipe for building and running a human bodywas to be published the very next twenty-four hours (the competition ended in an position tie). The first analysis of it had revealed that there were in effect(p) 30,000 genes in it, not the 100,000 that many a(prenominal) had been estimating until a a few(prenominal)er months before. Details had already been circulated to journalists chthonic embargo. But Venter, by speaking to a reporter at a biotechnology conference in France on Feb. , had in effect broken the embargo. Not for the first quantify in the increasingly bitter controversy over the genome project, Venters version of the story would jar against the headlines before his rivals. We simply do not have enough genes for this idea of biological determinism to be right, Venter told the Observer. The wonderful miscellany of the human species is not hard-wired in our contractable code. Our environments are critical. In truth, the number of human genes changed nothing.Venters remarks concealed two whopping nonsequiturs that few genes implied more than environmental influences and that 30,000 genes were too few to explain human nature, whereas 100,000 would have been enough. As one scientist put it to me a few weeks later, just 33 genes, each culmination in two varieties (on or off), w ould be enough to make every human being in the world unique. thither are more than 10 billion combinations that could come from flipping a coin 33 times, so 30,000 does not seem much(prenominal)(prenominal) a small number later all.Besides, if fewer genes meant more free will, yield flies would be freer than we are, bacteria freer appease and viruses the John Stuart Mill of biology. Fortunately, there was no need to reassure the population with such sophisticated calculations. People did not call at the humiliating news that our genome has wholly about twice as many genes as a worms. Nothing had been hung on the number 100,000, which was just a adult guess. But the human genome projectand the decades of search that preceded itdid force a much more nuanced understanding of how genes work.In the early days, scientists detailed how genes convert the various proteins that make up the cells in our bodies. Their more sophisticated and ultimately more satisfying discoverythat gene aspect can be modified by experiencehas been gradually emerging since the 1980s. scarce now is it dawning on scientists what a big and general idea it implies that breeding itself consists of nothing more than switching genes on and off. The more we lift the lid on the genome, the more vulnerable to experience genes out to be.