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In Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker discussed his participation in the Personal Genome Project. (We’ll give you a minute to find our coverage of the PGP-10 from November.) Typically, we look at new frontiers in science and marvel how far we’ve come. Pinker’s account of his experience perfectly illustrates the amount of work still necessary to understand the mind-bogglingly complex machinery within us.
Within a few years, almost everyone will be able to receive a full account of her DNA, with the 
associated risks for acquiring various diseases helpfully indicated in the report. But as Pinker points out, even our assessment of the most physically obvious traits is a bit lacking. “Height should therefore be a target-rich area in the search for genes, and in 2007 a genomewide scan of nearly 16,000 people turned up a dozen of them,” he said. “But these genes collectively accounted for just 2 percent of the variation in height, and a person who had most of the genes was barely an inch taller, on average, than a person who had few of them. If that’s the best we can do for height, which can be assessed with a tape measure, what can we expect for more elusive traits like intelligence or personality?”
He later noted that one gene tagged him with an 80% chance of baldness, which seemed rather silly for a grown man with (as you can see at right) a full head of hair. Perhaps those results will be snipped from later reports as we continue to acquire more useful data about the effects of specific genes. But what to do about a more serious situation he addressed? Different reports (from the PGP and a genome “report card” by 23andMe) indicated contradictory results about Pinker’s likelihood of developing prostate cancer, leaving him a bit puzzled. “Assessing risks from genomic data is not like using a pregnancy-test kit with its bright blue line. It’s more like writing a term paper on a topic with a huge and chaotic research literature,” he mused.
Our off-the-cuff remark last year about personal genomics seeming “Gattaca-esque” seems a tad premature after seeing the array of numbers and probabilities tossed Pinker’s way. But projects like the PGP are crucial in developing a more sophisticated level of understanding about what makes us tick. This of course leads us to a moral dilemma we will all have to face individually. It’s entirely possible that your genome scan may uncover an extremely high risk for a currently uncurable disease. If so, would you like to know? Pinker chose not to, given the option of seeing which variant of a gene for Alzheimer’s he has. (The “high-risk” version gave you three times the risk of Alzheimers if you have a copy from one parent; 15 times the risk if you have a copy from both.)
However, being a psychologist, in the end Pinker decided to put the challenges of personal genomics in perspective. “So if you are bitten by scientific or personal curiosity and can think in probabilities, by all means enjoy the fruits of personal genomics,” he counsels. “But if you want to know whether you are at risk for high cholesterol, have your cholesterol measured; if you want to know whether you are good at math, take a math test. And if you really want to know yourself (and this will be the test of how much you do), consider the suggestion of François La Rochefoucauld: ‘Our enemies’ opinion of us comes closer to the truth than our own.’”
Below the fold this week: BU scientists say “smoke ‘em if you got ‘em” (New Scientist), MIT experiments with a new way to teach intro physics (NYT).
Photo of Steven Pinker from Wikimedia Commons.
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