Blood Matters

by Masha Gessen

  Ebstein studied professional dancers, using professional athletes as a control group—to weed out genes that accounted for the athletic ability both fields would require. He found that there appeared to be a gene variant connected with creative dance ability, the same gene variant that had earlier been linked to spirituality. I was not tested for dancing ability. He studied hypnotizability and seemed to find genes related to one’s response to hypnosis. I was not tested for this, either. Ebstein also looked at genes connected with concern for appropriate self-presentation and the propensity for forming social relations (which they measured by looking at sibling relationships). I was not tested. I was, however, tested for ten different markers on a gene related to Prodynorphin, the body’s natural opioid, a building block for endorphins. I had my results, but Ebstein could not yet tell me whether they meant anything: It was an ongoing project. I had a feeling, though, that it would tell me something interesting.

  I asked Ebstein whether he thought that we were entering an era when people would look to genes for the truth about themselves. He mumbled something, then asked me to rephrase the question. I asked whether behavioral genetics was on its way to becoming the source of self-knowledge, whether people would be going for genetic testing the way they might now go for psychotherapy. Ebstein looked absent for a moment. “Oh.” He finally smiled. “Self-knowledge! Yeah, my daughter is really interested in that. I am not. I tend to be autistic, like most scientists,” he reminded me.

  On the subject of my own genes, Ebstein cautioned me against putting too much credence in my results. Many of my variants were so common as to have no statistically significant correlations. “Of your results, the short-short serotonin transporter is most believable,” he said, meaning that the variant was relatively uncommon and the evidence from various studies reasonably solid. “It’s the tendency toward neuroticism.”

  I knew it, really. The entire personality I had constructed was a function of my hypercompensation. Deep inside, I had always known myself to be a passive, cowardly person, unlikely to journey anywhere outside the realm of the very well-known. Had I been born in a middle-class U.S. suburb, I would probably still be living there. Knowing this about myself, and not liking what I knew, I tried to prove I could be my own hero: worldly and adventurous, self-absorbed and even seemingly callous, hypercompetent and overconfident. I had managed to convince many people, including myself. But now my true personality had been exposed by a genetic test.

  I was only partly joking.

  ***

  Of all the results that Inga had dictated to me over the phone, the one that struck me did not have to do with novelty-seeking or neuroticism. It was the MAOA gene, the “aggression gene”—the gene that landed all those Dutch men in trouble and the gene whose absence made Nina Popova’s mice eat their own. I turned out to have one short and one long allele. That meant I had a 50 percent chance of passing on either variant of the gene to any child I had. If the child was a boy, he would inherit the gene from me only: It was located on the X chromosome, of which he would have only one copy. So any biological son of mine would stand a 50 percent chance of inheriting a less-active MAOA gene, putting him at risk for aggressive and impulsive behavior and alcohol dependence. This described my adopted son perfectly.

  I not only loved Vova but admired him. He was smart, talented, and fantastically sensitive to the needs of others—even if one did not take into account his age and gender. He was at an age when I felt him becoming my friend. But sometimes, when I came up against traits that seemed foreign to me—like when I saw him swigging beer in the courtyard—I flashed an image of his birth mother, who I assumed had saddled him with an addiction gene.

  Years earlier, long before we adopted Vova, I had a conversation with a man who had adopted several children. I do not remember what I asked him about it, but I remember his answer: “I just don’t think that my genes are better than my neighbor’s genes.” He had been right about me too, and I had the evidence before me, scribbled in my notepad in blue ink: “MAOA = 3–4.”

  If there is one thing behavioral geneticists can agree on, it is that all of their findings are nothing but a reason to do further studies. These studies often fail to corroborate the earlier findings. Human behavioral genetics is a very young science: It is only now constructing its own foundation by sketching out an approximate map of the genes that may be linked to behavior. But, in addition to the need for caution, two other facts about behavioral genetics seem certain: It is a science of the future, and its findings will be staggering, transforming our understanding of ourselves in ways we may be unable now to imagine.

  Consider, again, the foxes and the rats in Siberia. The original purpose of Dmitry Belyaev’s study was to try to understand how the process of domestication may have turned the fairly homogeneous wolf into the wildly heterogeneous dog. He hypothesized that selection for behavior may have thrown the wolf’s genome out of whack, causing new mutations to appear faster than normal and activating or deactivating various genes. The hypothesis was confirmed: Soon enough, Belyaev’s tame silver foxes started producing offspring that had certain doglike traits: Some had floppy ears; some had tails that curled upward; some had shortened snouts; and some had characteristic changes in their coloring. These traits appeared at a rate several times higher than might have been explained by spontaneous mutation (the researchers were extremely careful to avoid inbreeding, so a founder effect could be ruled out). They appeared in some of the aggressive foxes, too—though not as often as in the domesticated ones—suggesting that it was the fact of selection for behavior, not the type of behavior chosen for selection, that wreaked havoc with the foxes’ genes.

  The Siberian researchers noticed, too, that all animals subjected to domestication, either in the lab or out in the world, seemed to exhibit similar traits—most often, changes in coat coloring: Dogs, horses, cows, foxes, and rats seemed to acquire a similar look, with discoloration on the chest. In the Novosibirsk lab, the rats changed in the most curious—and most stereotypical—ways. First, some of the tame rats showed the characteristic chest spots: These rats, the researchers determined, were heterozygous for the gene that seemed to determine coat coloring. The homozygotes, who appeared a few generations later, had a very specific “hooded” appearance, which was just what it sounds like: They looked like they were wearing light hoods. No “hooded” rats appeared on the aggressive side, where, instead, some all-black rats started to show up. It looked curiously appropriate: The “hooded” rats had the cuddly appearance of pets; the black rats looked especially mean—and they were.

  Extrapolating the results of such research to humans is, of course, very dangerous business. The most obvious argument against such extrapolation is that behavior traits such as tameness or aggressiveness are so crude that this sort of selection could never occur among modern human beings. At the same time, human beings are probably more complex and possibly more easily thrown out of genetic balance than rats or wolves—and certainly less genetically straightforward than Mendel’s peas. I asked Arkady Markel, the shy man who bred hypertensive rats, whether he thought his lab experiments pointed to the possibility that in small populations of humans, selected or self-selected for certain behavioral traits—like, say, the Amish—the rate of spontaneous genetic mutations might go up. He looked pleased with the question. “It’s possible,” he said, smiling conspiratorially. I thought of the paper on Ashkenazi intelligence I described in chapter 2: Perhaps the idea that Jews were so sickly because we were so smart—or, rather, selected for particular behavioral traits—was not so far-fetched.

  ***

  It will be years before scientists reach true consensus on matters such as genetic drift versus selection. It will be a while before a canon of scientific literature on behavioral genetics takes shape. A cultural prediction is easier to make: Biobabble is not just around the corner, it is already here.

  In a single month when I was going over the edits of this book, between July 15 an
d August 15, 2007, the New York Times published at least a dozen stories that mixed genetics and lifestyle. There was, for example, a story on the causes of autism; a story on prophylactic surgery for hereditary pancreatic cancer; a story on sweating that mentioned genetics almost in passing, as though it were fairly obvious; a story suggesting that the study of oddly genetically programmed bees might yield insight into human family dynamics; a story on one of those perennial surveys that show men have more sexual partners than do women, mentioning that men are compelled to spread their genes around; a story that suggested the pharmaceutical industry will be the first beneficiary of genetic engineering of livestock; a short piece debunking the myth that eating garlic helps repel mosquitoes, mentioning that only one’s genes could offer protection; an oddly incoherent op-ed about a cognitive theory of the self that mentioned genetic influence on who we are; a large magazine piece about children conceived with the help of a donor egg, noting offhandedly that genes do not families make; and a story on the identification of mutations linked with restless legs syndrome that suggested sufferers may now command more compassion and respect. But most interesting, there were at least six stories in that one month that had nothing to do with health or genetics but mentioned genes anyway. A story on the physicist and writer Gino Segre asserted that physics was in the protagonist’s genes; the review of a novel claimed casually that a character’s motivation was in his genes; and a long piece on the theories of industrial revolution claimed that “middle-class values needed for productivity could have been transmitted either culturally or genetically”; an op-ed contributor who suffered from excessive sweating dreamed up an antiperspirant that could “alter your gene structure”; a review of a store claimed that “Art Deco is the dominant gene” in the establishment; a sportswriter referred to a “cheating gene.”

  When I did a similar analysis of articles published in the New York Times a year earlier, I found that the number of references to genetics—both real and imagined—had roughly doubled. When I looked at the New York Times archives for the same period fifteen years earlier, I found articles on gene cloning and gene splicing, as well as Gene Hackman and Gene Tierney, but no casual use of the word gene in nonscience pieces, with one small exception: an amusing reference to “a gene for humor” in a review of a book by a geneticist. The reviewer was presciently ahead of his times.

  Language, it seems, is running ahead of knowledge: We have started speaking of genes that determine behavior, personality traits, and even lifestyle preferences before we have had a chance to learn what these genes might be. Industry is rushing to catch up: While I was writing this chapter, a company called Consumer Genetics was formed in Sunnyvale, California, and began advertising genetics tests that would show whether one’s rate of metabolizing caffeine or alcohol was fast or slow. By late summer of 2007 the caffeine test had become available, at the cost of $139. The alcohol-metabolizing test, which promised to tell you whether moderate drinking might lower your cholesterol level, was not available yet.

  Chapter 12

  What We Fear Most

  ALL OUR FEARS about the future of genetics are housed neatly, and unglamorously, in a two-story brick office building in Chicago’s Boystown. The reception area on the second floor, outfitted with the same gray carpet and months-old magazines as every medical waiting room in America, belongs to the Reproductive Genetics Institute, which offers in vitro fertilization services and prenatal testing. This was the first place in the United States, and one of the first in the world, where chorionic villus sampling (CVS)—an alternative to amniocentesis that can be offered at an earlier time in the pregnancy—was performed. This was the first place in the world where preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD, was offered, allowing future parents to weed out unsuitable embryos before implantation. This was where the first “spare parts baby” was conceived—a child selected as an embryo because he would be a suitable donor for his ill older sibling. This is also the place that claims to house the largest number of stem-cell lines in the world. For talk show hosts and science reporters worldwide, the men who run this institute are invaluable experts for commenting on things some of us are afraid to think about. For opponents of stem-cell research, these are the monster scientists of the future. The scientists themselves refuse to recognize the controversies.

  “Oh, this ethics!” barked Anver Kuliev, director of the institute, when I brought up the topic. “I personally wrote the section about ethics in our book.” He and Yury Verlinsky, president of the institute, have coauthored several books on preimplantation genetics. “Usually people say ‘slippery slope,’ people talk a lot, they will never understand much—it’s just talk and talk and talk. And actually I did this in three or four pages. Because we have not much time for talk, we have to do the actual work. And also, the place for PGD is just in general practice. Because it’s already there. It’s primary prevention.” I found Kuliev and Verlinsky’s book, and I read the section on ethics. It was four and a half pages of dense and cogent argument, which testified to the fact that Kuliev took this area more seriously than he let on. But the main argument, both for his impatience and his institute’s practice, was singular: There is no stopping the genetics future you say is so scary, because that future is already here.

  The history of the Reproductive Genetics Institute spans two continents and a couple of decades and includes the stories of scientific quests and inspired discoveries, mixed with a dash of international intrigue. Back in the 1970s, Yury Verlinsky, born in Ukraine and educated there in cancer cytogenetics, and Anver Kuliev, born in Azerbaijan and trained in medicine and genetics, teamed up at a research institute in Moscow. Their goal was to develop a prenatal test that could be administered earlier than amniocentesis, allowing women to avoid second-trimester abortions. To do this, they were trying to test tiny samples of placental tissue rather than amniotic fluid, as with amniocentesis. Various researchers had tried this since the 1960s, but no one had succeeded in getting an accurate sample safely. In the midseventies, a group of Chinese researchers reported limited success (four out of a hundred women in their study lost their pregnancies, and six of the diagnoses were erroneous). In Moscow, Kuliev, Verlinsky, and a Hungarian postdoc named Zoltán Kazy were trying to develop a technique for performing a chromosomal analysis of the tissue. They failed.

  In 1979, along with about fifty thousand other Soviet Jews, Verlinsky, his wife, and their nine-year-old son emigrated. They settled in Chicago, where Verlinsky was hired to run the cytogenetics laboratory at the Michael Reese Hospital—because, he explained to me, “of my previous experience and because a chromosome in any language is a chromosome and a microscope is a microscope.” Verlinsky was working on identifying chromosomal polymorphisms in Down syndrome families and dabbling in chorionic villus sampling on the side: He was using tissue obtained from abortions to try to develop a technique for performing a chromosomal analysis. This time, he succeeded.

  Like all Soviet émigrés, Verlinsky could have no contact with colleagues back home. Zoltán Kazy was publishing papers with Russian researchers, reporting some success with chorionic villus sampling. There was no trace of Anver Kuliev in international journals, however. Then his name came up during a scientific meeting in London, where Verlinsky was reporting on his success with chromosomal analysis and a British researcher named Bruno Branbatti was boasting that he had learned to perform a molecular analysis of chorionic villi tissue. They were talking about marrying the techniques. Someone mentioned that all of this should go to a Dr. Kuliev, who was now head of genetics at the World Health Organization. While Verlinsky the émigré had been stripped of his Soviet citizenship, his former colleague had made a brilliant career as a Soviet medical bureaucrat: He was serving the WHO as a representative of the USSR.

  “I said, ‘Dr. Kuliev is my close friend,’” said Verlinsky, who after nearly thirty years in the United States spoke fluent and idiomatic English with one of the most stereotypically Russian accents I had heard. “
They thought I was bluffing. So we called Geneva, and I said, ‘Anver, this is Yury, I know how to do what we were trying to do in Moscow.’ And he said, ‘Oh, come over and let’s make a meeting in Geneva.’ And in ’82 we started to do—the first in the United States—CVS. So when I was in the meeting in Geneva, I was already looking forward and I was saying, ‘Let’s do preimplantation.’”

  That same year, Verlinsky began his research into in vitro fertilization and the possibility of performing chromosomal analysis on embryos. Now that his old research partner was again part of the process, every couple of years, international scientists working in this area would meet somewhere under the auspices of the World Health Organization. In 1987 the group was meeting in Israel. Verlinsky wandered into an art gallery and found himself staring at a painting by Joan Miró. “The circle was red and yellow and collapsed at the end,” remembered Verlinsky. “And I thought, ‘This is it, this looks like an oocyte. And if this is yellow, we know exactly where will be red. And if it’s red, we know where will be yellow.’ I marked this idea on this business card from this art gallery.”