Tag Archives: genetics

My Genes Made Me Do It

brain_LizHenry_FlickrBradley Kreit of IFTF has a provocative piece on behavioral genetics.


A court in Italy has shortened the prison sentence of a convicted murderer due to the prisoner’s heightened genetic predisposition for violence, according to Nature News. Specifically, the appeals court judge held that because the prisoner had five genetic mutations linked to violent behavior, as well as brain scan abnormalities, “would make him particularly aggressive in stressful situations.”


Kreit notes that this suggests an overconfidence in our understanding of the relationship of genes and behavior.  He also notes the odd logic of this decision: an expert in the Nature news source “points out that prosecutors could use the same genetic evidence to argue for tougher sentences by suggesting people with such genes are inherently ‘bad’.”


The Italian court seems to be taking a common stance: that the mind — what we think of as a person — is separate from the brain and its underlying genome.  In this instance, they seem to be reasoning that the murderer is not evil, or fully responsible, because his behavior is hard-wired: he didn’t do it, his brain did.


The problem with this approach is that the mind is ultimately a product of the brain: all behavior has underlying physical shapers (though not, in most cases, determinants).  Everything good and bad that people have ever done was heavily shaped by brain chemistry and their genomes; it’s just that we have never been able to detect and measure the shapers in the past.


Now we can. We want to use this knowledge to help people, including those with “bad genes.”  But an explanation is not an excuse.  It does not mean that the we have to abandon our prior sense of right and wrong, or better or worse.   We will retain the right to say that something is evil, or good, even as we know more about how it came to be.


(Image courtesy Liz Henry, Flickr)

Genetics: Faking DNA

DNA_mknowles_FlickrIn Gattaca, the demand for genetic perfection drives genetic deception: people use substitute DNA to disguise their “inadequacies.”

The method in Gattaca was relatively simple: the “perfect,” impostor blood was put in a fake fingertip, so that an automatic sampler would take the wrong blood.

Now a team of scientists has already gone further, the New York Times reports. The team “fabricated blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor of the blood and saliva. They also showed that if they had access to a DNA profile in a database, they could construct a sample of DNA to match that profile without obtaining any tissue from that person.”

In other words, “any biology undergraduate” (in their words) could use a DNA profile to make fake genetic evidence, tying the victim to a place or activity they had nothing to do with.

For now, this method would not allow faking the full genome, but it is likely that if certain characteristics were being sought in a sample in the future, this or a similar technology could fake them by then.

(Thanks to Christopher Kent for the tip.)

(Image courtesy mknowles, Flickr)

Legal Issues of the Future

Justice by Billogs (Flickr)As the Sotomayor hearings went on this week, I talked to a reporter about legal issues that a justice might see in the next 25 years, going beyond our present obsessions. (I did not actually say that senators should ask Sotomayor about them.)

Topics included:

  • virtual reality
  • artificial intelligence
  • genetic engineering and human enhancement
  • brain technology
  • human-animal hybrids

About artificial intelligence, I said, in part:

“People have been talking about the possibility of a “singularity” (in which artificial intelligence becomes sentient) in a couple of decades. It involves two questions: if something says it’s sentient, do we believe it? And if so, do we care? It may be more of a question if it involves a biological system. Does something require a biological brain to be human?”

(Image courtesy Billogs, Flickr)

Breeding Superapes?

The monkeys are comingNot exactly. But last month scientists announced that monkeys had passed genetic modifications to their offspring for the first time.

Planet of the Apes it is not; the genetic modifications merely cause the monkeys to glow green under fluorescent light.

But it is another step toward the world of Gattaca: we have achieved heritable modifications with primates, and the “same techniques would be used on chimps or other primates even closer to humans or to try to endow people with desirable genetic traits,” the article noted.

Source: Rob Stein, “Monkeys first to inherit genetic modifications,” SFGate.com, May 28, 2009. Image copyright FutureAtlas.com — usable with link and attribution

My Comment on Genetics in Wired

wiredukThe new British version of Wired included a comment from me on genetics.

“We expect that this price will continue to drop, making some form of genetic analysis accessible to large numbers of people within the next decade,” [Linda Avey] says. Tamar Kasriel likens sequencing to a “Damocletian threat”, but Josh Calder disagrees. “The list of things we can partially prevent or prepare for is going to grow long enough that we’re going to want to do it.”

I’m not actually disagreeing with Kasriel: some ways that we could pursue genetic knowledge and biotech are indeed deeply threatening. I just suspect that collectively we are going to want to use that knowledge to prevent suffering, and that will almost inevitably blur into improvements (even if we don’t go as far as Gattaca), with different people and cultures disagreeing about the desirable and permissible boundaries of this use of genetics.