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The Gene: An Intimate History weaves together science, history & personal stories for a historical biography of the human genome, while also exploring breakthroughs for diagnosis & treatment of genetic diseases & the complex ethical questions they raise.
- (133)
- 2020-04-07
- Documentary
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THE GENE weaves together science, history & personal stories for a historical biography of the human genome, while also exploring breakthroughs for diagnosis & treatment of genetic...
“The Gene: An Intimate History” is a major new four-hour documentary from Ken Burns and Barak Goodman, adapted from the award-winning book of the same name by Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee.
Full TV Schedule. About the Show. The Gene: An Intimate History interweaves an account of the thrilling revolution in modern genetic science with powerful stories from the frontlines of medicine.
- Overview
- Your book’s subtitle is “An Intimate History.” Can you talk about the personal inspiration behind the story of the gene?
- You call the gene, “one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in the history of science.” Unpack that thought for us.
- We both have identical twins in our lives: your mother and aunt, and my elder brothers, are identical twins. Why are twins so important in gene research?
- The pseudoscience of eugenics reached its apotheosis in Nazi Germany. But I think our readers will be shocked to discover that much of the groundwork was actually done in America. Tell us about Carrie Buck.
- The word genocide shares its root with gene. Describe the methods used by Hitler’s eugenicists and how they prefigured the Holocaust.
- The great quantum leap forward in the story of the gene was DNA, which James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix, called “the Rosetta stone for unraveling the true secret of life.” Why was it so important?
- At one point in the movie The Help, an African-American maid named Aibee says, “We’s the same. Just a different color.” Tell us about Mitochondrial Eve.
- One of the most controversial books of recent decades was The Bell Curve. What was it trying to prove—and why was it wrong?
- What do genes tell us about sexual identity? Is there a “gay gene”?
Genes influence who we are—and now we can manipulate them.
The gene is “one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in the history of science,” argues Siddhartha Mukherjee in The Gene: An Intimate History. Since its discovery by Gregor Mendel, an obscure Moravian monk, the gene has been both a force for good and ill. In the 1930s, the Nazis exploited the pseudoscience of eugenics as a prelude to the Holocaust. Today, gene therapy holds out the hope of eradicating hereditary conditions like Huntington’s disease and even psychological disturbances, such as schizophrenia. [See how the DNA revolution is giving us unprecedented power.]
I’ve been thinking about this book for a very long time. Even before I had written my book on cancer, I had thought about the perennial question of why we are like and unlike each other. In my particular case, the question revolved around mental illness. Why were two uncles and one cousin of my family affected while the rest of us didn’t seem to be? That question was very much part of the background of my childhood and adolescence. My uncle Jagu, who lived with us, was provisionally diagnosed with a mental disease, which was called schizophrenia, but died before a lot of the terminology became clear.
A host of studies were being published in the 2000s linking schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, suggesting that there are strong familial and potentially genetic links between these mental disorders. Added to that was the question why, in crisscrossing family histories, some members are affected and others not. In other words, how did genes intercept with environment and chance to create powerful influences on human form and fate? That’s the central question in the book—and it’s also encapsulated in the history of my family.
Powerful because of the question of heredity and identity, which is a central question that animates this book. What makes us who we are and how do we transmit that information? To what extent does heredity control our identity? These are among the most powerful questions we ask ourselves. They are also among the most dangerous because they raise t...
Twins represent a fascinating natural experiment. Aside from a few exceptions, their genomes are identical. So, how they turn out in the world, what diseases they get exposed to, what aspects of self they share, is a way to solve what aspects of human nature are influenced by genes versus not. It’s very important to remember that I’m using the word...
I dedicate the book to Carrie Buck because she was one of the first women in the U.S. to be sterilized by court mandate. She was suspected of having hereditary mental illness and, in the 1920s, in order to cleanse the population of her genes, was confined to a place called the Virginia State Colony. One of the superintendents of the colony was a ma...
In the 1920s to '40s, the Nazi Party launches the racial hygiene movement to try and ensure they cleanse the human race of genetic infirmaries. They try to identify anyone who has a suspected hereditary infirmity: the deaf, the blind, or those with congenital illnesses of various sorts. There’s a whole series of propaganda films, in which they try ...
In the 1910s and 1920s, people had thought about what was carrying the code to build organisms and to repair and maintain organisms. But they didn’t know what chemical form it was in. Thomas Morgan, the great fruit fly biologist, had, along with others, understood that genetic information was carried in chromosomes. But he didn’t know what chemical carried it, why the chemical carried it, and how a chemical could carry all this information. So the hunt was to try to find the chemical that carried this information. If you could identify that chemical and manipulate or move it from one organism to another organism, you could potentially change biological, hereditary information.
The discovery that it was DNA that carried genetic information was an enormous surprise. It was done by Oswald Avery and his colleagues at Rockefeller University in the 1940s. Then the race began to try to solve the structure. How on Earth could DNA carry information to build you and me? That was solved by discovering the structure of DNA. Later, it became clear that the structure allowed DNA to carry information in this unbelievable form: the sequence A, C, T, G, G, C, G, A, and so forth. Four letters carrying the information that allows humans to be built. And this ultimately led to the Human Genome Project.
Mitochondrial Eve is a fascinating concept. The idea is that the genetic information we inherit comes from our fathers and mothers, one chromosome from each. There’s an exception to this, though: an energy-making factory in our cells, which also has genetic information. But that genetic information comes exclusively from your mother. If you look at...
It was trying to understand the underpinnings of human intelligence and the extent to which human genes can influence it. If you look carefully, genes do influence one notion we have considered for human intelligence: the IQ test. It’s one test for human intelligence. But The Bell Curve tries to make the argument that, not only was there a genetic influence on IQ but, more than that, if you measured intelligence across various “races”—and I use the word races in inverted quotes because these are handed down to us from the 18th and 19th centuries—you would find that Asians and Caucasians scored higher on these tests for intelligence by about 10 to 15 points.
Why is it wrong? The most important reason is that the construction of an IQ test is itself an idea that has been brought into question since the 1990s. We now know that if you subgroup the IQ testing into subtests, white people score higher in some parts of the test and black people score higher in other parts of the test. The way you change the weights and balances in the test determines the ultimate score.
We know that genetics has a powerful influence on sexual identity. We also know that there is no single gene that determines most sexual identity. Much remains undiscovered about the exact genes that influence sexual identity but we know that there is an influence, based on twin studies. There is no such thing as a “gay gene,” though. There may be ...
Apr 11, 2017 · Explore the history and impact of genetics in "The Gene: An Intimate History" by BBC Science Focus Magazine.
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The Gene: An Intimate History. Science, social history and personal stories weave together a historical biography of the human genome while also exploring the stunning breakthroughs in understanding the impact genes play on heredity, disease and behavior. View Documentary.
