The Language of the Genes

by Steve Jones

  His biography reveals an unrelieved eccentricity, well illustrated by the titles of a dozen of his three hundred scientific papers: On spectacles for divers; Statistical inquiries into the efficacy ol" prayer; Nuts and men; The average flush of excitement; Visions of sane persons; Pedigree moths; Arithmetic by smell; Three generations of lunatic cats; Strawberry cure for gout; (hitting a round cake on scientific principles; Good and bad temper in English families; and The relative sensitivity nl' men and women at the nape of the neck. Galton travelled much in Africa, regarding the natives with some contempt and measuring the buttocks of the women using a sextant and the principles of surveying.

  Galton's work led, indirectly, to today's explosion in human genetics. His particular interest was in the inheritance of genius (a class within which he placed himself). In his 1869 book Hereditary Genius, he investigated the ancestry of distinguished people and found a tendency for talent to crop up again and again in the same family. This, he suggested, showed that ability was inborn and not acquired. Hereditary Genius marked the first attempt to establish patterns of human inheritance with well-defined traits — such as becoming (or failing to become) a judge — rather than with mere speculation about vague qualities such as fecklessness.

  Galton and his followers would be astonished at what biology can now do. It still does not understand attributes such as genius (and reputable scientists hardly concern themselves with them), but DNA is much involved in mental and physical illness. Half a million DNA samples have been taken by police in Britain since the test was invented, and the government has a scheme to follow the genes — and the ailments — of the same number of its citizens over two decades in the hope of finding the biological errors responsible for killers like cancer and heart disease. New tests mean that parents can sometimes choose whether to risk the birth of a child with.in inborn defect. Ten thousand such illnesses are known,uul il we include, as we should, all ailments with an inherited component, most people die because of the genes they carry.

  Genetics does more than reveal fate. Humans share much of their heritage with other creatures. As Galton himself illustrated with the appropriate impression pasted near that made by Gladstone, the prime minister, chimpanzees have fingerprints. Now we know that much of their DNA is identical to our own (as indeed is that of bananas). All this suggests that humans and apes are close relatives.

  Genetics is the key to the past. As every gene must have an ancestor, inherited diversity can be used to piece together a picture of history more complete than from any other source. Each segment of DNA is a message from our forebears and together they contain the whole story of human evolution. Everyone alive today is a living fossil and carries within themselves a record that revisits the birth of humankind. The Origin of Species expresses the hope that light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history'. Darwin's hint that humans share a common descent with all other creatures is now accepted by all scientists, because of the evidence of the genes.

  Evolution, the appearance of new forms by the alteration of those already present, is no more than descent with modification. The same is true of language. As a boy, I was amused by the tale of the order going down the line of command to soldiers in the trenches. 'Send reinforcements, we're going to advance' changed to 'Send three and fourp-ence, we're going to a dance' as it passed from man to man. This simple tale illustrates how accidents, as an inherited message is copied, can lead to change. Because of mutation, life, too, is garbled during transmission.

  This book is about inherit.nur: about the clues of our past, present and future that we.ill contain. The language of the genes has a simple.ilpluhct, with not twenty-six letters, but four; the DNA bases.ulenine, guanine, cytos-ine and thymine (A, G, (1 ami T for short). They are arranged in words of thin- letters such as CGA or TGG. Most code for different.imnio.u ids, which are themselves joined together to in.ike proteins, the building blocks of the body.

  The economy of life's lanj'.ii.u'.r *..m be illustrated with an odd quotation from a book c.illeil (utiisby, written in 1939 by one Ernest Wright: 'I am going 10 show you how a bunch of bright young folks ditl find a chiimpion, a man with boys and girls of his own, a man ot so dominating and happy individuality that youth was dr.iwit 10 him as a fly to a sugar bowl.' This sounds somewhat peculiar, as does the rest of the fifty-thousand word book, 1111! it is. The quotation, and the whole work, lacks ihe letter 'e An English sentence can be written with twenty — five letters instead of twenty-six, but only just. Biology manages with a mere four.

  Although its vocabulary is simple the genetic.il message is very long. Each cell in the body contains about six feet of DNA. There are so many cells that if all the DNA in a single human body were stretched out it would reach to the moon and back eight thousand times.

  Twenty years ago, the Human Genome Project set out to read the whole of its three thousand million letters, and to publish perhaps the most dreary volume ever written, the equivalent of a dozen or so copies of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The task is now more or less complete. The sequencers followed a grand scientific tradition: the Admiralty, after all, sent the Beagle to South America with Darwin on board not because they were interested in evolution but because they knew that if they were to understand (and, with luck, control) the world, the first step was to map it. The chart of the genes, like that <>t the Americas, lias been expensive to make; but — like the theory of evolution itself — it may change our perception of ourselves.

  Powerful ideas like inheritance and evolution soon attract myths. Impressed by his studies of genius, (Jalton founded the science (if that is the right word) of eugenics. Its main aim was *to check the birth rate of the Unfit and improve the race by furthering the productivity of the fit by early marriage of the best stock'. He led the new field of human genetics into a blind alley from which it did not emerge for half a century. At his death, he left £45,000 to found the Laboratory of National Eugenics at University College London and, in fine Victorian tradition, £2.00 to his servant who had worked for him for forty years. His research institute soon changed its name to the Galton Laboratory to escape from the eugenical taint. What became of his servant is not recorded.

  Galton's social ideas and Darwin's evolutionary insights had a pervasive effect on the intellectual history of the twentieth century. They influenced left and right, liberal and reactionary, and continue — explicitly or otherwise — to do so. Many disparate figures trace their ideas to The Origin and to Hereditary Genius. All are united by one belief: in biology as destiny, in the power of genes over those who bear them. The most famous monument in Highgate Cemetery in London, a couple of miles north of today's Galton Laboratory, is that of Karl Marx. Its inscription is well known: 'Philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it.' Darwinism was soon used in an attempt to live up to that demand. The philosopher Herbert Spencer, buried just across the path from Marx, founded what he called Social Darwinism; the notion that poverty and wealth are inevitable as they reflect the biological rules that govern society. In his day, Spencer was famous. His Times obituary cLiimcd that 'England has lost the most widely celebrated.nul influential of her sons.' Now he is remembered only ior that neatly circular phrase 'the survival of the fittest'.iiul lor inventing the word 'evolution'.

  He wrote with a true philosopher's clarity: 'Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion; during which matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity, to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, through continuous differentiations and integrations'. Those lucid lines were parodied by a mathematical contemporary: 'A change from a nohowish, untalkaboutable all-alikeness to a somehowish and in general talkaboutable not-all-alikeness by continuous somethingelsifications and sticktogetherations.'

  Spencer used The Origin of Species as a rationale for the excesses of capitalism. The steel magnate Andrew Carnegie was one of many to be impressed by the idea that evolution excuses injustice. He invited Herbert Spenc
er to Pittsburgh. Unfortunately, the philosopher's response to his trip to see his theories worked out in steel and concrete was that 'Six months' residence here would justify suicide.'

  Galton, too, supported the idea of breeding from the best and sterilising those whose inheritance did not meet with his approval. The eugenics movement joined a gentle concern for the unborn with a brutal rejection of the rights of the living (a combination not unknown today). Galton's main interest in genetics was as a means to forestall the imminent decline of the human race. He claimed that families of 'genius' had fewer children than most and was concerned about what this meant for the future. It was man's duty to interfere with his own evolution. As he said: 'What Nature does blindly and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly and kindly.' Perhaps his own childless state helped to explain his anxiety.

  Many of the eugenicists shared the highly heritable attributes of wealth, education and social position. Francis Gal-ton gained his affluence from his family of Quaker gunmakers. Much of his agenda was the survival of the richest. Other eugenicists were on the left. They felt that if economies could be planned, so could genes. George Bernard Shaw, at a meeting attended by Galton in his last years, claimed that 'Men and women select their wives and husbands far less carefully than they select their cashiers and cooks.' Later, he wrote that 'Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly.' Shaw was, no doubt, playing his role as Bad Boy to the Gentry, but subsequent events made his tomfoolery seem even less droll than it did at the time.

  Sometimes, such notions were put into practice. Paraguay has an isolated village with an unusual name: Nueva Germania, New Germany. Many of its inhabitants have blonde hair and blue eyes. Their names are not Spanish, but are more likely to be Schutte or Neumann. They are the descendants of an experiment; an attempt to improve humankind. Their ancestors were chosen from the people of Saxony in 1886 by Elisabeth Nietzsche — sister of the philosopher, who himself uttered the immortal phrase 'What in the world has caused more damage than the follies of the compassionate?' — as particularly splendid specimens, selected for the purity of their blood. The idea was suggested by Wagner (who once planned to visit). The New Germans were expected to found a community so favoured in its genetic endowment that it would be the seed of a new race of supermen. Elisabeth Nietzsche died in 1935 and Hitler himself wept at her funeral. Today the people of Nueva Germania arc poor, inbred and diseased. Their Utopia has failed.

  The eugenics movement hatl an influence elsewhere in the New World. In 1898, Charles Davenport, then professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard, was appointed as Director of the Cold Sprint* I larbor Laboratory on Long Island Sound. Initially, tin* 1,iU>r.itory concentrated on the study of *the normal variation of ihc animals in the harbor, lakes and woods, and the production of abnormalities'. It carried out sonic of ilic inosi important work in early twentieth-century biology.

  Soon, Mrs E H Harriman, widow of the railway millionaire, decided to devote part of her fortune to the study of human improvement. The Eugenics Record Office was built next to the original laboratory. It employed two hundred field workers, who were sent out to collect pedigrees. Their 750,000 genetic records included studies of inherited disease and of colour blindness; but also recorded the inheritance of shyness, pauperism, nomadism, and moral control.

  Davenport's work had an important effect on American society. The first years of the twentieth century saw eugeni-cal ciubs with prizes for the fittest families and, for the first time, medicine became concerned about whether its duty to the future outweighed the interests of some of those alive today. In Galtonian style, Davenport claimed that: 'Society must protect itself; as it claims the right to deprive the murderer of his life so also may it annihilate the hideous serpent of hopelessly vicious protoplasm.' Twenty-five thousand Americans were sterilised because they might pass feeble-mindedness or criminality to future generations. One judge compared sterilisation with vaccination. The common good, he said, overrode individual rights.

  Another political leader had similar views. The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate. I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut oft and scaled off before another year has passed." Such were the words of Winston Churchill when Home Secretary in 19 10. I lis beliefs were seen as so inflammatory by later British governments that they were not made public until 1992.

  One of Galton's followers was the German embryologist Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel was a keen supporter of evolution. He came up with the idea {which later influenced Freud) that every animal re-lived its evolutionary past during its embryonic development. His interest in Galton and Darwin and his belief in inheritance as fate led him to found the Monist League, which had thousands of members before the First World War. It argued for the application of biological rules to society and for the survival of some races — those with the finest heritage — at the expense of others. Haeckel claimed social rules were the natural laws of heredity and adaptation. The evolutionary destiny of the Germans was to overcome inferior peoples: 'The Germans have deviated furthest from the common form of ape-like men.. The lower races are psychologically nearer to the animals than to civilized Europeans. We must, therefore, assign a totally different value to their lives.1

  In 1900 the arms manufacturer Krupp offered a large prize for the best essay on 'What can the Theory of Evolution tell us about Domestic Political Development and the Legislation of the State?' There were sixty entries. In spite of the interests of capital, the first German eugenic sterilisation was carried out by a socialist doctor (albeit one who claimed that trade union leaders were more likely to be blond than were their followers).

  While imprisoned after the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler read the standard German text on human genetics, The Principles of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene, by Eugene Fischer. Fischer was the director of the Berlin Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. One of his assistants, Joseph Mengele, later achieved a certain notoriety for his attempts to put G.iltonian ideas into practice. Fischer's book contained.1 chilling phrase: 'The question of the quality of our hm'iliury endowment' — it said — 'is a hundred times more import.nit than the dispute over capitalism or socialism,'

  His thoughts were echoed 111 Mcin Kainpf: 'Whoever is not bodily and spiritually healthy and worthy shall not have the right to pass on his suffering in the body of his children'. Hitler took this to its dreadful conclusion with the murder of those he saw as less favoured in order to breed from the best. The task was taken seriously, with four hundred thousand sterilisations of those deemed unworthy to pass on their genes, sometimes by the secret use of X-rays as the victims filled in forms. Those in charge of the programme in Hamburg estimated that one fifth of its people deserved to be treated in this way.

  By 1936 the German Society for Race Hygiene had more than sixty branches and doctorates in racial science were offered at several German universities. (!ert;iin peoples were, they claimed, inferior because or inheritance. Half of those at the Wannsee Conference (which decided on the final solution of the Jewish problem) had doctorates and many justified their crimes on scientific grounds. The eugenics movement in Germany was opposed to abortion {except of the unfit) and imposed stiff penalties — up to ten years in prison — on any doctor rash enough to carry it out. The number of children born to women of approved stock went up by a fifth. The Hitlerian conjunction of extreme right wing views, an obsession with racial purity and a hatred of abortion has its echoes today.

  Concern for the purity of German blood reached absurd lengths. One unfortunate member of the National Socialist Party received a transfusion from a Jew after he had been in a road accident. I le was brought before a disciplinary court to see if he should hci'Mlmlrd from the Party
. Fortunately, the donor had fought in the lust World War, so that his Jewish red cells were — just about — acceptable.

  The disaster of the Nazi experiment ended the eugenics movement, at least in its primitive form. Its blemished past means that human genetics is marked by the fingerprints of its own history. It sometimes seems to find them hard to wipe off. They should not be forgotten now that the subject is, for the first time, in a position to control the biological future.

  Galton and his followers felt free to invent a science which accorded with their own prejudices. They believed that the duty to genes outweighs that to those who bear them. They were filled with extraordinary seif-assurance and great weight was placed on their views although in retrospect it is obvious that they knew almost nothing.

  Today's new knowledge is as controversial as was the old ignorance. Even so, disputes among modern biologists are not about the vague general issues that obsessed their predecessors. Instead they concern themselves with the fate of individuals rather than of all humanity. Genetics has become a science and, as such, has narrowed its horizons.