I actually would like to take this occasion to praise and thank the TAs.
We've been teaching this course for about a dozen years and we've had
some really excellent groups of TAs, but this year's crop is really off
scale, really outstanding. And we're all very grateful.
[APPLAUSE] You know their names. I won't go through them all.
But the fact of the matter is these TAs teach this course because
they're told to teach the course, and at the same time they're doing
all their thesis research, so they end spending about 168 hours
a week on various kinds of work. So it's not a natural thing for
them to spend an enormous amount of time, as they have been this year,
really just off scale extraordinarily good.
Here they are, Winston, Susan, Michelle, Sara, Divia,
Jim, Sydney, Yasmine and Cha. So thank you all.
At the same time, I'd also like to thank Claudette
Gardel who runs this thing. This is a large undertaking,
believe it or not, with almost 350 students enrolled,
but it's moved seamlessly and without any problems this year for
which many of us are very grateful. So, thank you Claudette. I'm going
to spend today trying to broadcast into the future,
forecast into the future I should say, about where all of what we've
talked about this semester is taking us.
Where is it going to get it us in terms of where we're going to be ten
or twenty years from now and what you're going to be in the middle of
ten or twenty years from now as you begin to move,
as it will happen surely, as day follows night, into midlife.
Imagine that. When you're 35 or 40 this will happen.
And in order to do so I just want to go back 125 years or so to give
you a feeling for what the history of biology has been like,
some of it, since the end of the 19th century.
Just to give you a little flavor for what can happen to biology if things
aren't done right. Charles Darwin had a cousin named
Francis Galton. He was knighted by the Queen and
called Sir Francis Galton. And he was an early pioneer in
statistics. And he coined the term eugenics. And,
as you may note, eugenics is simply the science of
trying to use genetics to bread better livestock,
better plants, and ultimately maybe to breed better human beings.
And we humans have been doing eugenics on plants and livestock for
at least 10,000 years. That is to say we have continually
been selecting out the best of the breed as the progenitors of the next
generation of the breed. And in that way corn, which was
originally this large when it was grown 5,000 years ago in Mexico,
the cobs have now become this large and quite tasty.
And all of that is through selective breeding. But in the last half of
the 19th century, inspired by Darwin and subsequently
by Mendel's work on Mendelian genetics, a whole science of
eugenics grew up in this country which included not only the
improvement in the quality of livestock and plants but also
improvements in the gene pool of humanity. There was a strong
conviction that genes were directly responsible for all kinds of
physical traits, as well as mental and psychological
traits. There was a strong belief that some
races were superior and other races were inferior because of genetic
gifts or genetic deficits. And this included as well within
races, however one defined them, different ethnic groups. There was
a firm belief that science could ultimately solve a lot of social
problems including urban violence, labor unrest, manic depression,
schizophrenia and even mental retardation.
And the eugenicists, as they came to be known,
came to believe that the problems of the world, alcoholism,
poverty, prostitution, criminality, feeblemindedness, chess playing
ability, tendency to commit industrial sabotage,
that was big in the beginning of the 20th century when the unions were
coming into power, they were all associated with one or
another rather penetrant Mendelian allele.
A well known geneticist named Davenport, who subsequently was
associated with an unnamed university up Mass Ave.
studied various ethnic groups and races and concluded that on the
basis of genetics the Germans ranked highest in quality such as
leadership, humor, generosity, sympathy and loyalty.
Italians and Irish ranked lowest in most of these traits,
he was lucky he survived in this town since together Italians and
Irish, I think encompass 70% of the population.
British were lowest in two of the traits. Irish were highest in
suspiciousness. Jews were highest in obtrusiveness,
whatever that is. And all of these things were said to be genetically
templated. And so at the beginning of World War I IQ tests were first
instituted in this country during the draft in order to determine who
was genetically fit to serve and who was below standard.
And using IQ tests, which were implemented in great
numbers and throughout the society in the 1920s, a well known
geneticist named Goddard discovered that 80% of Jewish,
Hungarian and Polish immigrants, as well as Italian and Russian
immigrants were mentally defective or feebleminded,
and that these traits, these mental defects in 80% of these
groups were transmitted as regularly and as surely as the color
of hair or eyes. I'm not making up fairy tales now.
I'm telling you what's happened in our history. In the 1920s there was
a Eugenics Record Office in this country which existed for the next
twenty years, an American Eugenics Society which has 1200 people,
and J.H. Kellogg of Battle Creek, Michigan, you know how he made his
money, don't you? Cornflakes. He founded a Race Betterment
Association whose intent was to better the gene pool of the American
population through selective breeding. By 1928 there were 376
college courses taught across this country on the subject of eugenics,
i.e., how to improve the human race by beginning to breed more
fit individuals. And so when the Nazis came to power,
as they did in 1933 in Germany, they had much to draw from.
In fact, most of their scientific rationale, to the extent they had
any, didn't come from Germany, it came from eugenicists in the
United States. And so they began to look amongst
their society for people who were useless eaters,
i.e., they consumed food but didn't produce, they lived lives not worth
living, the elderly, the chronic poor, the crippled and
the misfits. And they began involuntary
sterilization. So, people who were regarded as
genetically less fit were sterilized. By the time the Nazis finished
their 12 years in power, 400,000 people had been sterilized
in Germany because for one or another reason they were regarded as
somehow defective. And as the Second World War made
resources more tight, they just did something much simpler,
they just euthanized people, they just killed them if they were
regarded as in one way or another genetically defective.
In fact, my father had a first cousin who around 1936 or so was
gassed because he had a bad stuttering defect.
So, this is all things that really happened to people.
As a consequence of all of this eugenics, by 1924 Immigration Act
was passed which severely circumscribed the amount of people
immigrating into this country because the immigrants were widely
viewed as diluting and contaminating the American gene pool.
And this probably, well, this undoubtedly had a
devastating affect on this country which we'll never really be able to
know because the truth of the matter is that to the extent we have
economic and scientific robustness in this country,
it has come, for the last century, year after year, generation after
generation from the immigrants who come to this country,
not people who were here three, four, five generations.
It's the immigrants who brought in the new ideas,
the energy, the power, and I venture to say that if I were
to ask what fraction of you are first generation Americans the
number would be pretty high, right? But in 1924 that was for a
while stopped simply because people coming into the country were viewed
as genetically less than acceptable.
By 1940 thirty states had compulsory sterilization laws in this country,
i.e., people who were deemed to be genetically less gifted were
sterilized against their will. 60,000 of those sterilizations were
performed in this country. And the eugenics moment gained more
and more adherence. What shut it off ultimately was what
happened in World War II where six million Jews were killed,
along with probably five or six million Slavs and other races who
were deemed, and gypsies, there were probably half a million
gypsies killed by the Nazis, different groups of people who were
deemed to be genetically less deserving of living and genetically
less likely to be productive and useful human beings.
And were it not for World War II, it's quite plausible that the
eugenics movement would have continued to grow and that today,
when we talk about genetics, much of it would be referred to a belief
that somehow we can determine people's phenotype and genotype and
that we can predict how useful or useless they're going to be on the
basis of our insights into genetics. And this ideology of genetic
determinism, I say it had a great decline, this is the phrase we use,
genetic determinism, i.e., to say that an individual's life course is
strongly dictated by his or her genome.
These are her alleles. You heard a lot about the alleles
last time from Eric. But genetic determinism is once
again coming to the forefront. Why? Because now, for the first
time, we actually have a science of human genetics.
When all of this other stuff was going on 50 and 100 years ago it was
all pseudo-science, it was all made up. No one had the
vaguest idea what genes were present in people's DNA.
They didn't even know about DNA. They didn't really know about most
Mendelian traits being passed in human populations.
And they had no way of knowing, in the vast majority of cases,
whether a certain person's phenotype was or was not dictated by genotype.
So is this notion of a strong genotype-phenotype connection
totally nonsense? Well, I'll give you an example of
where you might begin to think it isn't. And it comes from studies of
identical twins who were separated at birth and brought up
in different families. So these identical twins obviously
have an identical genotype. So here's a famous story that I
like to refer to. There was a chance meeting in 1979
between a steelworker named Jim Lewis and a clerical worker named
Jim Springer. They both lived in Ohio. They were separated five
weeks after birth and they were raised 80 miles apart in different
towns in Ohio. And at the age of 39 they
discovered themselves through some change meeting.
They discovered each other. Well, they both had dark hair,
they both stool six feet tall and they both weighed 180 pounds.
That's not so surprising. They both spoke with the same inflections,
which they clearly had not yet learned to speak with when they were
five weeks old. They walked with the same gait.
They made the same gestures. They both loved stockcar racing.
They both hated baseball. They both married women named Linda.
They were both divorced and in their second marriages both of them
married women named Betty. They both drove Chevrolets.
They drank Miller Lite. They both chain smoked Salems.
They vacationed on the same half-mile of beach in Florida.
They both had elevated blood pressure, severe migraines,
both had undergone vasectomies, they both bit their nails, and their
heart rates, their brainwaves and their IQs were so similar that you
couldn't tell whether it was the same person or two separate people
being studied. Now, what do you begin to think of
all that? Well, that's an extreme case.
The fact is most identical twins raised apart do have a bit of
divergence in their phenotype, in the way they grow up, but it
begins to plant in your mind the notion that maybe many aspects of
the way we think and act actually have a strong genetic template in
them. And one can begin to study identical twins and ask things about,
especially those who are separated at birth, and not use such extreme
anecdotes like the one I just used. And one begins to find that there's
an impressive list of attributes that can only be explained by their
being a strong genetic determinant in them. And these traits include
being alienated by people around one, extroverted, being a traditionalist,
looking backwards in terms of one's customs, leadership,
career choice, risk aversion, attention deficit disorder,
religious conviction and vulnerability to stress.
Heritability it turns out, if you study identical twins,
is about, I'm sorry, happiness, if you study identical twins, is
about 80% heritable it turns out and depends little on one's wealth,
achievement or marital status. But 80% of it, if you study identical
twins, seems to have a genetic template. And you'll say,
well, that's all very satisfying, but it begins to be a little
unsettling because it begins to cause each of us to ask are we
really who we think we are or are we just kind of cassette recorders who
are playing out the program that was stuffed into us when the sperm hit
the egg that lead to each of our appearing on the face
of the planet? To what extent are we individuals or
to what extent are we simply manifestations of genotype?
And to what extent do we have freewill? That's kind of an
interesting question. Now, people like Eric,
I'm not pointing an accusing finger, people like Eric have begun to
refine the science of genetics so it really is a science.
And so, restriction fragment polymorphisms,
SNPs, haplotype analysis are now uncovering a staggering array of
human traits. I believe that the number of human traits that have now
been localized, specific genes, most of these are
diseased genes, exceeds 2,000 is my recollection.
And there are only 21,000, 22,000 genes in the human genome.
And the pace with which genes and genotype and phenotype will be
linked to one another is going to increase if nothing else.
Many of the traits that one thinks about in terms of human beings are
obviously polygenic. They're not single strong Mendelian
alleles with strong penitence. They represent the confluence,
the collaboration of multiple alleles that are conspiring to
create one or another phenotype. And these polygenic traits or even
polygenic diseases have traditionally resisted analysis
because mathematically they are so complex to dissect out,
to dissect out the contributing genes which together as a cohort
create a genotype. But, as Eric told you last time,
people like you who are great software developers will one day
begin to figure out how one can take extraordinarily complex datasets and
begin to associate specific chromosomal regions,
and ultimately genes, with specific genetic sequences that
contribute to a polygenic trait. I think at one time Eric spent,
about three or four years ago, he worked with people at Cornell
studying the polygenic trade of ripening in tomatoes.
It's a polygenic trait like probably chess playing ability in
human beings. And was able to localize ripening rate of tomatoes
to five or six distinct genetic regions in the chromosomes of the
tomato plant. But that's only a harbinger of what could come.
So let's imagine now, again, I'm not blaming Eric for this,
I'm just telling you he's the one, he more than anyone else almost on
the planet is the person who is leading the charge to refine and
strengthen these extraordinarily powerful tools that enable us to
discern how our genome creates us the way we are.
But he's not going to be the one who applies these tools.
They'll be applied all over the planet.
There are geneticists everywhere who are interested in looking at how
different aspects of human phenotype, including disease phenotype are
governed by the alleles, by the SNPs, by the polymorphisms
that we carry, and obviously by the genes and
proteins that we make. So let's begin to imagine,
let's put ourselves fast-forward ten years and begin to imagine where
this is going to take us. We already know about a very
substantial number of genes that determine the risk of different
kinds of cancer, i.e., there's at least 15 different
cancer syndromes that people have which have been associated with
specific genetic loci. I talked briefly about retinal
blastoma, which is a rare one, but even commonly occurring cancers
will soon be connected with specific alleles in the genome.
And the risk of getting them in one's lifetime will be relatively
accurately predictable. It might take another decade but it
will happen. Manic depressiveness,
some people have great swings in mood. 2% or 3% of the population
doesn't wake up happy every morning. And this is also, I believe, going
to yield two specific analyses and association with certain genes.
There's already a suggestion that the D4 dopamine receptor,
which is involved in receiving one of the neurotransmitters in the
brain, may have a polymorphism that's connected with manic
depressiveness. There will be probably alleles which
are connected with, in some way, novelty or adventure
seeking. There are going to be alleles that are associated with
anxiety, probably maybe connected with the serotonin transporter in
the brain. Cardiac disease susceptibility is already mapped out
in a number of traits in the most extreme cases,
but cardiac disease is very frequent in this population.
And there undoubtedly will be alleles that are discovered that
determine whether one has a high risk or low risk of getting heart
disease, of getting arthrosclerosis, and whether or not one can go to
McDonald's every day and Big Macs with impunity.
Can one do that or not? Some people probably can.
Some people can eat as much salt as they want and it doesn't give them
high blood pressure. Other people cannot.
We still don't really understand that. Schizophrenia is probably
also very strongly genetically templated, not totally but very
strongly. Susceptibility to rheumatoid arthritis probably also
has a strong genetic component. Difficulty or ease with which you
solve math problems probably also will one day be associated with a
certain number of genetic loci. How many difficulties in learning
languages? There's already a trait that was discovered in a family in
the Netherlands, I believe, and they had a very
specific grammatical defect in the way that they assembled the syntax
of sentences associated with a certain allele of a certain gene.
Difficulty in just adding rows of numbers may also be associated with
certain combinations of alleles. Now, you will say, well, it's
impossible, it's inconceivable that these different aspects of cognitive
function can be associated with a small number of genes.
But let me tell you something else. We talked a week ago about the
evolution of humanity over the last couple hundred thousand years.
And the pace with which the human brain has evolved over the last half
million years, and more recently the last 200,
00 years, has been so frighteningly rapid that the evolution of
cognitive function and perception in different ways can only have
happened through the actions of a small number of genes.
If one needed to have dozens of genes change in concert in order to
acquire the penetrating minds that we now have in which our ancestors
500,000 years didn't have, the evolution could not have
occurred so quickly. And, for that reason alone,
one begins to suspect that the genetic differences between people
who lived 500, 00 years ago visa vie their
cognitive function and ours are not so large. And,
therefore, a rather small number of genes may have been responsible for
conferring on us the powerful minds which we now, which most of us,
I didn't say anything, which most of us now possess.
So where is this going to take us? What are the consequences of this?
Let's imagine ten or twenty years down the road when we can do some
kind of SNP analysis on one of these chips that have been developed in
California and here and in various places. And we can begin to imagine
the allelic diversity in a newborn child's DNA or even prenatally
if you want. So what are you going to do if you
begin to find on a chip of a child's DNA that this kid is likely to be
very good in language, probably is going to have poor math
skills, will be a rather anxious and obsessive person,
will have difficulty associating with his or her peers,
and is likely to come down with heart disease at the age of 45?
How is that going to affect your relationship to that
person, that child? And will you give that child a
different kind of education than a newborn who has SNPs which indicate
that without doubt they're going to get 1600s on their morning boards
and their shoe-ins for admission to MIT? Are you going to treat those
kids the same or are you going to treat them differently?
Do you give them the same kind of education and nurturing?
And how do you treat them throughout their elementary and high
school? Are you going to segregate them into different groups or is
everybody going to be given an equal chance?
Well, you might say it's our tradition in this country to give
everybody equal footing, in part because of a reaction to
what happened in World War II in no small part. But what if the time
comes when people say we need to be more efficient economically in this
country and we need to devote our resources, need to maximize the
investment, the benefit we get from various investments,
and so it's much more efficient to put kids in a certain genetic class
in one school and kids who have another level of genetic giftedness
in another school? Of course much of this will be
foolhardy because all of these genetic tests,
although they will give you probabilities of certain phenotypes,
they'll never, at least for the foreseeable generation or two give
you certainties. No one will be able to predict with
absolute total certainty about the potentials of one or another young
person on the basis of DNA tests, at least not in the near future.
Right now one can predict with total certainty that somebody who has a
certain allele will come down with Huntington's disease at the age of
30 or 40 or 50. There the predictability,
the penitence is 100%. But what if somebody has an allele that says
with 60% likelihood they're not going to very good at math?
Is that already going to be enough to justify their segregation amongst
a group of the mathematically less gifted?
Let's say that they've gone through elementary and secondary education
and high school and they've made it through college and they start
looking for employment. Actually, there are jobs out here
to be had in this economy, you wouldn't know it, but there
actually are people who can find jobs. And let's say one has now an
employer who is evaluating a certain job candidate for employability.
Maybe they'd like to have a good medical checkup before they employ
this person ostensively to see whether this person is healthy
enough to last for ten or twenty or thirty years of employment.
And maybe they'd like to include among that medical exam that
person's DNA just in case. And what if the DNA tells the
employer that this individual is likely to get colon cancer in 18
years and has a slight susceptibility to mood instability
and perhaps even manic depressiveness,
that this person is not one of those who can go to McDonald's and eat Big
Macs with impunity but has a tendency to arthrosclerosis?
You can think of whatever possibilities you will.
Will that be, therefore, a ground to reject that person as an
employee? Well, you'll say they really have no right
to do that. But keep in mind that with increasing frequency in this
society medical benefits, medical insurance is paid by the
employer. So does the employer want to have a whole workforce of people
who are in various stages of terminal disease or would this
employer like to be able to pay the lowest possible health benefits
because the employer has taken care to employ only people who have a
really terrific genotype, whatever that is defined as being
arbitrarily admittedly? And what about marriagability?
As my sister always says to me, if you want to marry a man the first
thing you should do is look into his genes. That's a double
entendre. Anyhow.
See, somebody finally got it. [LAUGHTER]
The fact is that maybe certain
people will be deemed to be less desirable genetically.
Well, the fact is we've been doing that for the last million years.
If you're attracted to someone and you end up marrying them then they
have phenotypes which you think are in one way or another valuable.
Consciously or unconsciously, you are practicing a form of
eugenics. But obviously there could be a much more subtle form of
eugenics where part of the marriage contract states that you want a
sample of that person's buccal swab or some lymphocytes to check out
what kind of DNA he or she has. Now you say, well, that could never
happen. But it happens today regularly.
There are villages in Greece where there are a substantial percentage
of people who carry the trait sickle cell anemia which,
as you may know, is not so serious phenotypically in heterozygous form,
but in the homozygous form is actually devastating.
And the reason they have sickle cell anemia is that those areas of
Greece historically had high rates of malaria. And,
as you may know, sickle cell anemia actually protects,
in the heterozygous state actually protects one from the ravages of the
malarial parasite. So about 20 years ago it became
possible to do a simple genetic test to determine whether an individual
was heterozygous for sickle cell anemia. And what happened is that
somehow what was supposed to be confidential medical genetic tests
got out. They became public. And young individuals in the
population became known as carrier, as heterozygotes for sickle cell
trait, even though phenotypically they were reasonably normal because
the heterozygote condition is not so devastating.
So those individuals were soon ostracized, to use an old Greek word.
They were soon put to the side. They were placed in the pool of the
unmarriable because nobody wanted to marry them. And so they then,
as a consequence, began to marry amongst themselves.
Remember what I told you about homozygosis with the sickle cell
trait. But that's only one example of that.
Among Orthodox Jews, among Ashkenazi Jews between 2% and
3% of the population carries an allele for Tay-Sachs disease which
is phenotypically silent in the heterozygous state but in the
homozygous state is a devastating condition which leads to death in
the first years of life. So now among the Orthodox Jews in
New York before two young people will get married they will do a test
to see whether they are heterozygous for the Ta Sacks allele.
And, in fact, it's not limited any longer to Orthodox Jews.
Because if they're both heterozygotes their marriage to one
another, in spite of anything else they consider,
is strongly discouraged. Among those who don't live in such
a closely structured society such people might nonetheless decide to
get married and then face the devastating possibility of one of
their four offspring on average coming out as a homozygote and
having an incurable genetic disease which is going to lead
to their early death. But what about other traits?
And what time will this genetic discrimination,
where will it begin and where will it end? What if you find an
individual who has a trait of manic depressiveness among relatives?
And when will these genetic tests become public?
When will they be private knowledge? You say, well,
they can all be kept private. But ultimately there are already
insurance companies which are demanding to determine whether and
individual can be insured by looking at whether they have genes for
certain kinds of disease-causing alleles.
After all, why should they insure somebody, give somebody life
insurance if they are likely to come down with Huntington's disease at
the age between 35 and 40, which will surely and inevitably
lead them to an early grave? You'll say, well, we cannot have
genetic information like that become public or even become accessible.
Maybe that's a solution. The problem is we've been talking
about these issues for 10 to 15 years in this society,
and we've not yet converged any kind of solution. And the solutions to
these problems should not be left in the hands of molecular biologists,
because molecular biologists or biologically cognizant people by now,
like you, are no more gifted and no more insightful to deal with these
issues than anyone else is. They're intuitively obvious these
issues. You don't need to know about SNPs to begin to understand
the potentially devastating impacts that the misuse of genetics can have
on our society. And what happens if one of these
days people discover alleles for certain aspects of cognitive
function? Chess playing ability. The ability to learn five different
languages. The ability to remember strings of numbers.
The ability to speak extemporaneously in front of a class,
for what it's worth, for 50 minutes several times a week.
Whatever ability you want,
valued or not so valued, what if those alleles begin to come out?
And here's the worse part. What if somebody begins to look for the
frequency of those alleles in different ethnic groups scattered
across this planet? Now, you will say to me,
well, God has made all his children equal. But the fact is if you look
at the details of human evolution, some of which I discussed with you a
week ago, last week, you'll come to realize that most
populations in humanity are the modern descendents of very
small founder groups. Remember about the story of the Fins.
70% of Finish men carry the same Y chromosome. All modern Fins,
most modern Fins, all of them are likely to be the descendents of a
small founder group that came into Finland 2,000 or 3,
00 years ago and carry with them the peculiar set of polymorphisms that
founder group happens to have had. And arguments like that begin to
persuade you that there'll be different allele frequencies in
different populations of humanity. What if somebody begins to discover
that Macedonians have an enormously high rate of the ability to play
chess because of a certain allele? And here I'm talking very
speculatively. I'm not literally meaning that.
And Tibetans have a very poor ability to construct software
programs because of a genetic allele they carry? I hope nobody's Tibetan
here. I tried to choose two. Are there any Macedonians? All
right. I succeeded. All right. Anyhow. So the fact is
it's inescapable that different alleles are going to be present with
different frequencies in different inbreeding populations of humanity
or populations of humanity that traditionally have been genetically
isolated from one another. It's not as if all the genes that we
carry have been mixed with everybody else's genes freely over the last
100,000 years. Different groups have breed
separately and have, for reasons that I've told you,
founder affects and genetic drift acquired different sets and
different constellations of alleles. So what's going to happen then, I
ask you without wishing to hear an answer because nobody really knows?
Then for the first time there could be a racism which is based not on
some kind of virulent ideology, not based on some kind of kooky
versions of genetics, because the eugenicists in the
beginning of the 20th century, as well as the Nazis hadn't had any
idea about genetics, they were just using the word,
even though they knew nothing about the science of genetics as we
understand it today. But what happens if now for the
first time we, i.e., you who begin to understand
genetics, begin to perceive that there are, in fact,
different populations of humanity that are endowed with different
constellation of alleles that we imagine are more or less desirable?
What's going to happen then? I don't know. But some scientists
say, well, the truth must come out and that everything that can be
learned should be learned, and we will learn how to digest it
and we will learn how to live with that. But I'm not so sure that's
the right thing. And you all have to wrestle with
that as well. And even more insidious is the
following notion. Remember the story about the two
Jims, the two guys from Ohio who met one another at the age of 39 after
they'd been separated at five weeks of birth? That story begins to
persuade you of something I said before, and that is that a lot of
what you think you are isn't what you made of yourself,
isn't what your parents made of yourself, isn't what your
environment made of you and your experiences.
Maybe it's all just in your genes. And if that's so then maybe you
can't take credit for any of the good things you've done.
And conversely maybe you're not responsible for all the bad things
you've done. Maybe three years from now somebody will begin to plead
that even though they were not criminally insane when they
committed a string of serial murders, in fact it really wasn't their fault
because they happen to have this particular genotype which is known
to be correlated with a strong tendency to violent.
And, by the way, there is an allele which has a
correlation, I forget which one it is, has a correlation with violent
behavior. So what if one begins to write off everything we do as not a
reflection of our own freewill, our own volition, but instead a
consequence of the genes which our parents hoisted on us?
Of course, we can blame it on them. As a father of children, I can tell
you that it's amazing how many different things can be blamed on
the parents. [LAUGHTER] Of course, the parents have their
own out. The parents can blame it on their parents.
So now it goes back to the grandparents, back to the beginning
of time. We laugh about these things and they are amusing,
but they are taking us on a collision course with some very
difficult problems. And you guys have to wrestle with
them and you guys have to explain to the people who haven't taken 7.
12 where the world of biology is taking us.
And on that note, I want to tell you that Eric and I
have enormously enjoyed being with you this semester.
We wish you much luck and success in your future lives.
We hope some of you have become interested in biology and that you
found this course a little different from what you took in high school.
And have a wonderful winter vacation. See you. [APPLAUSE]