What does illness mean?

Writers love disease. It fulfills all sorts of useful functions; it can be used to investigate fictional characters, and even give them a greater depth and nobility (e.g. ‘The Magic Mountain’ by Mann). It can act as a metaphor for societal problems (think of ‘The Plague’ by Camus). Illness is not allowed to be itself.

It’s not just writers who like this way of thinking. It seems to be ubiquitous. But this attachment of metaphor to illness is very pre-science. TB was thought to favour sensitive, artistic souls, until Koch’s discovery of the relevant bacterium[1]. Cancer doesn’t have a simple one-size-fits-all cause or cure, so people speculate that it can be associated with, or caused by, repressed feelings, and cured by having a positive attitude.

In her famous essay ‘Illness and its Metaphors’, Susan Sontag criticised the widespread use of military metaphors in the discussion of cancer. Implicit in many descriptions of life with cancer is the assumption that if you don’t battle against the disease you are surrendering, and must bear the blame if the disease wins. She pointed out that many major illnesses have their own set of distinct metaphors, and what these metaphors really tell us about is our attitude to the illness, not the illness itself.

The metaphors get more complicated when the boundaries of the illness itself get fuzzier. What if we discover we are carriers of an illness that hasn’t actually caused any symptoms – yet? What if an illness runs in our families but no one’s yet found any relevant gene that could be deemed to be a cause? Are we ‘ill’ in either of those circumstances?

Illness has an extra dimension now; the dimension of time. And a new grammar to describe it; the grammar of the possible, and the subjunctive.
The commonly used metaphor for genes’ potential to cause illness is a ‘timebomb’ waiting to go off; something external buried deep within ourselves that is primed to explode at an time unknown to us. This ‘timebomb’ is another use of the military metaphor, and as with cancer, externalises the cause of the illness in a way that is essentially incorrect. Genes are not external forces (although they may, or may not, act according to external forces). They are part of us, they help define us.

We can behave in ways that may lessen the probability of us developing an illness (note that I don’t use the word ‘protect’ – another metaphor from the battlefield) but we are our illnesses as well as our health. We can’t own one without the other.

We need to develop new metaphors.

[1] Actually, cause and effect get jumbled here. TB was also thought to make the sufferer more pre-disposed to an artistic temperament if they weren’t already so inclined.

The ghosts in the human genome machine

The purpose of the Human Genome Project was to map all the individual bases that make up our DNA. There are four types of these bases, adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine, and they combine to form genes.

Now that the project has achieved its main goal and finished the sequencing, the next step is to identify the actual genes as distinct from the majority of the material, the so-called ‘junk DNA’. (Only a tiny proportion of the overall DNA actually consists of genes.)

Humans share 99.9% of their genes, and so the information discovered through the HGP is relevant to all of us. As we have about 20,000-25,000 genes, only a handful are unique to any one of us. But whose DNA was actually sequenced? The project used samples from anonymous donors. Neither the scientists nor the donors know whose samples actually ended up being sequenced, but it is clear that more than one person’s was used, i.e. the information we have is an amalgamation from different donors. Because the ‘map’ created by the HGP is actually linear – a sequence of letters corresponding to the order of bases, at any one point in the sequence, the information we have corresponds to just one unknown donor, but we don’t know who.

This deliberate uncertainty interests me. Scientists (whatever their discipline) spend so much time battling uncertainty, trying to quantify or eliminate it from their work. Much of this uncertainty is caused by random fluctuations or systematic biases in what they are trying to measure. Both need to be understood and accounted for, if you’re trying to make sense of your external world. And more fundamental uncertainties exist in quantum physics, which are not simply due to errors or limitations in the way that we measure things.

So it seems counter-intuitive to increase the amount of uncertainty in this major experiment. But clearly it has several purposes. Uncertainty about knowledge of the donors can protect them from the consequences of having their genome sequenced. For example, subsequent identification of genes relating to disease can’t be attributed back to a particular donor. Also, by banishing information on the particular donors, the experiment is able to interest everyone. It encourages us all to feel that that map has a direct relevance to each and every one of us. As a result, the project is allowed to gain a certain amount of authority.

But you could just as easily say that the project is relevant to no one. What does it mean to sequence a genome of a person that doesn’t actually exist?

This partial information is an excellent example of synecdoche, a type of metaphor in which part of a thing is used to stand in for its entirety. We don’t yet have DNA sequences for all humans, and we don’t yet know which parts of the sequence we do have are shared by all humans. So ‘The Human Genome Project’ is a misnomer.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be too harsh. In practice, it’s actually impossible to communicate without using synecdoche. Fiction writers know that they can’t get across the entirety of their fictional characters. They write about aspects of these characters, and the reader uses these a bit like dried milk, to reconstitute them and make up their own pictures.

Or you can say ‘there is nothing outside the text’, and therefore the human genome is just a sequence of bases, and we are free to give it as much or as little significance as we wish.

Free will with every packet of cornflakes

Yesterday I spent all day writing. What I produced was rubbish, all 2000 words of it. The words were flat and lifeless with no energy at all. In contrast, last week I was working on short story and the words zinged across the screen. I didn’t know where those words came from, I hadn’t planned them in advance. They just appeared.

Every fiction writer knows the excitement of setting up a situation and then being surprised at what happens next. Your characters can behave in ways that surprise you. Are they exhibiting free will? Even when you consciously plot out your characters’ stories, you have to be sensitive to what feels right and what doesn’t. If you force your characters to do something for the sake of the overall story, they may turn into puppets. They lose their ‘divine spark’ and the story can feel over-engineered. (Interestingly, this may only be true in literature. In Kleist’s famous essay on marionettes, he pointed out that they can be more graceful and more likely to achieve ‘perfection’ in their movements than humans, precisely because they lack human’s self-consciousness which, according to him, inhibits a complete understanding of the universe.)

Nowadays, free will is elusive. It suffered a fatal blow in the seventeenth century from Newton’s discovery of universal physical laws. The corresponding vision of a wholly predictable and mechanistic universe which only needs to be set going before it simply carries on for ever, doesn’t seem to need free will.

A universe that allows time travel (ours doesn’t appear to rule it out) must also impinge upon free will in some way, if only to prevent logical paradoxes (think of ‘Back to the Future’).

Is there any space for free will in quantum physics? After all, it (re)introduces uncertainty into physical systems, albeit on atomic scales. But this uncertainty (in the ability to know simultaneously an object’s position and momentum) is random. And when we exhibit free will, we don’t think we behave randomly.

Geneticists don’t have much time for free will, either. We’re creatures ruled by genes and all our behaviour can be explained by those genes’ desire to replicate themselves. Even apparent altruism to other people only seems to exist because we share practically all of our genetic material (99.9%).

So perhaps we enjoy reading about characters in novels who appear to exercise choice because that choice is a mirage in our real lives. Do our fictional characters have more free will than we do?

Where do you stay?

I’ve already mentioned in a previous posting the complexities around the links between genes and Jewishness. Sharing an ethnicity does not mean sharing an exclusive genepool. There can be more variation within shared ethnicities than between them. And the link between genes and nationalities is even more complex, although perhaps less so in a small country like Scotland which has had relatively little immigration. Perhaps nationalities are (becoming) more memetic than genetic – one can learn to be a different nationality through subconsciously, or consciously, adopting the mores of the people around you.

For example, when I was a child we drank coffee. We hardly ever drank tea. Although my parents were both born in England, one grew up in America and the other was the child of German and Austrian immigrants, and neither had a history of drinking tea. Even as a child I drank coffee for breakfast. Now (perhaps as a result of living in Yorkshire for several years and having a partner from there) I drink tea all the time, and so does my father. Has he learnt it from me?

But sometimes you can get stuck in the middle – for example, I never know what to reply when someone asks me where I ‘stay’. Scottish people use the word as a synonym for ‘live’ or ‘reside’. If I reply ‘I stay at…’ it feels artificial, as if I’m appropriating someone else’s language. But if I reply ‘I live at…’ it implies I’ve thought about using the word ‘stay’, have rejected it as being too Scottish for me, and have retreated to ‘standard’ English. Either alternative makes me feel self-conscious.

Perhaps I should make up my own word.

I’ve learnt that genes are influenced by their envronment, too. They get turned on, or ‘expressed’, by influences surrounding them. This environment stretches all the way from the neighbouring genes, through the rest of the cell, the host organism, and the wider environment. So, genes are not little bullet entities that whistle unperturbed through their host organisms, only randomly mutating. (This concept of ‘random mutations’ sounded so dangerous when I first read about it and I couldn’t figure out why until I realised that it’s a reminder of radioactivity.)

This adaptation to your surroundings can be reflected in laws on nationality. Different countries have different attitudes and laws on the conferring of nationality is conferred. Some use ‘blood’ (e.g. Germany before 2000) through which you can confer your nationality to your offspring even when they’re born outwith the country, others use ‘territory’(e.g. USA) through which your offspring automatically achieve that nationality by virtue of being born there. Those that use territory – do they place more emphasis on learning behaviours and attitudes, such as the desire to aspire to ‘American’ ideals? Because there are no genetic links to rely on to hold society together?

Notice that I used the Scots word ‘outwith’ in the previous paragraph. Perhaps I’m adapting my language after all.

Naming things...

Why do we love words so much? Is there a gene responsible for the love of language?

There’s a lot of commentary on genes which seems to conflate the four bases with the alphabetic symbols used to describe them; A, C, G, and T. For example, I’ve read that ‘genes are made up of sequences of these four letters’. But at the risk of stating the obvious, bases are not letters, they’re acids. So are we confusing the thing with its symbol?

The statement ‘DNA behaves like a written instruction’ is a powerful analogy. But not everything is language. DNA is not a written instruction, and to say it is muddles the distinction between a thing and its name. Perhaps this is a hangover from the belief in magic, the power of the spell and the perception that to know a thing’s true or secret name was to have some power over that thing.

I think there is a related confusion over the reporting of a new gene being discovered and its role. Often we are presented with information on the name of a new gene with the implication that there is now an understanding of what that gene does. The naming of chemical elements, living organisms and genes allows us to structure and order our external world. But it does not necessarily explain it.

And I love the fact that there appears to be no order or structure in the way that genes are named. It seems that anarchy rules, and there are no naming conventions. By contrast, in astronomy only solar system objects get names, and now everything else just gets a rather prosaic mixture of letters and numbers, usually based on their coordinates and the catalogue in which they are listed. This wasn’t always so. Stars which are visible to the naked eye, and which therefore were identified and named before the invention of the telescope kickstarted astronomy in the West, tend to show the influence of medieval Arabic civilisations. There is a sort of palimpsest on the night sky, we look through a web of names and their associated civilisations when we look up at the stars.

So in the future, people will look at genes’ names and get a sense of the civilisation that produced them. They may ask themselves what on earth was meant by ‘radical fringe’, ‘mindbomb’, or ‘zinc finger’. They may try and infer something about the processes which produced these names. They may suggest that geneticists in the 21^st century were using these names to convey secret messages to one another, to rebel against the authoritarian times in which they lived, or to provide an amusing counterpoint to the way that science was normally described at that time. I wonder what they’ll think…