Phil Elmore: Individual Authoring Services

Family Ties
Slapping the Human Genome

The male Elmores breed remarkably true. If you line up my father, his brother, me, and my brother, you'll swear you're looking at one of those evolution charts. Not that each of us gets progressively taller and learns to walk fully upright as you progress down the line, but glancing quickly from one of us to the next is like watching time lapse photography. I'm sure strangers that see us together never doubt that we are related.

Our heads are all the same shape, our stocky builds are identical, and our chins and cheekbones have the same basic structure. This was true of my grandfather, as well. All the male Elmores looked very much alike as children, and pictures of my brother and me in our toddler years are indistinguishable from each other. The one exception is my uncle's son, whose recessive genes grant him a tendency towards slimness not found in the rest of us. He is blonde (as is his sister), while the rest of us sport (at least originally) brown hair. I look at my uncle, and I see the future of my hairline; my bald spot is developing in the back, as did his, even though my father started losing his hair from the top.

None of you has expressed an interest in starting a franchise clone factory stocked exclusively with quick-tempered, pear-shaped technical writers. Nonetheless, the genetic similarity in my family helps me make a point: you would think, given how we look, that we would share similar personalities. This is important because the drive in what passes for contemporary science (which is supposed to be objective, but which is constantly driven by political desires and agendas) is to reduce all humanity to a genetic code. The Human Genome project, if I understand it correctly, is supposed to give us a road map to our very being, and certainly popular culture seeks to assign all human behavior to our complex and sometimes naughty little chromosomes.

In fact, my father, uncle, and brother are very different from me and each other. There are similarities, yes, such as the peculiar sense of humor I share with my brother, but we possess a full range of personality traits. Look from one to another and you'll see us vary from type A to type B, tightly wrapped to easy going, ruthlessly responsible to care free. Try as I might, I can't seem to get my male relatives to share my total passion for collecting knives. Even though my father tried to teach me chess, I'll always prefer checkers.

There exists in the world a scientific community, commonly referred to as "they," whose members are chiefly concerned with the daily publishing of "studies" in the nation's newspapers. "A new study today," the typical left-hand front page blurb will read, "established a link between a food everyone likes and a horrible disease nobody wants." When not busy telling you what foods will kill you, or retracting an earlier statement about foods that will kill you in order to state firmly that these results were apparently completely and utterly incorrect, the great and powerful "they" are spending their time finding the genes responsible for all human actions.

Got a problem with alcoholism? You're not a drunk; you've got a genetic trait, a hereditary little illness that's not your responsibility. Cheating on your wife? You can't help it; Nature wired you to need to have sex as often as possible. Have a tendency toward violent behavior? We're working on finding a genetic reason for why people become serial killers and pile their houseguests in numerous one-pound packages in the freezer. Spend too much time on the Internet? You're an addict, and we're pretty sure you've got a gene that makes you pretend to be a seventeen year old nymphomaniac named "Brandi" who spends all her time in Star Trek chat rooms and whose parents don't understand her dream to become a lingerie model.

Name the condition, tendency, penchant, predisposition, character flaw, deformity, shortcoming, or quality, and you'll find someone trying to find the gene that determines it. There are a lot of people concerned that mapping the human genome will lead to a kind of genetic totalitarianism, a world in which we identify what you will become before you are born, and decide whether or not to let you get that far. Others are excited about the prospect of being able to assign to all undesirable or unfortunate human behavior or physical conditions a specific gene, in order to pursue preventive or corrective measures.

The problem goes deeper and starts earlier than that. What concerns me is the very attitude underlying this genetic research. I don't doubt that it is possible, at least eventually, to completely map what makes us us. I don't dispute the idea that there is a gene for every part of human expression and action, for our genes are the building blocks of our persons. What I question is this desire to dismiss as irrelevant the choices we make as human beings.

It will sound strange, but I was playing a Japanese video game called Metal Gear Solid when the idea for this column struck me. The game, which involves a lot of intricate CGI pseudo-cinema, contains a relatively deep message about genetics and the role our genetics play in determining our destiny. "We are more," a character states at the game's conclusion, "than the sum of our genes." And regardless of the source, that's a true statement. We are more than a pile of Legos, held hostage to the colors and pegs of our components. We are more than slaves to inbred desires or preprogrammed tendencies. We are more than helpless automatons spending our lives at the mercy of our genetic weaknesses.

Being human means being able to rise above your base passions, to choose what you will do rather than what you want to do. The two may not be different all the time, or even most of the time, but at the least you must know that you have a choice. You are not at the mercy of your genes. You are not a victim of your DNA. You are a human being, and greater than the sum of your parts.