by Sheldon Krimsky (Editor), Jeremy Gruber (Editor), Jon Beckwith (Contributor), Carl F. Cranor (Contributor), Martha R. Herbert (Contributor), Mae-Wan Ho (Contributor), Ruth Hubbard (Contributor), Eva Jablonka (Contributor), David S. Jones Ph.D. M.D. (Contributor), Jay Joseph (Contributor), Evelyn Fox Keller (Contributor), M.S. Lindee (Contributor), David S. Moore (Contributor), Stuart Newman (Contributor), Carl Ratner (Contributor), Shirley Shalev (Contributor), Carlos Sonnenschein (Contributor), Ana M. Soto (Contributor), Stephen L. Talbott (Contributor), William C. Thompson (Contributor)
Can genes determine which
fifty-year-old will succumb to Alzheimer’s, which citizen will turn out
on voting day, and which child will be marked for a life of crime? Yes,
according to the Internet, a few scientific studies, and some in the
biotechnology industry who should know better. Sheldon Krimsky and
Jeremy Gruber gather a team of genetic experts to argue that treating
genes as the holy grail of our physical being is a patently unscientific
endeavor. Genetic Explanations urges us to replace our faith in
genetic determinism with scientific knowledge about how DNA actually
contributes to human development.
The concept of the gene has been
steadily revised since Watson and Crick discovered the structure of the
DNA molecule in 1953. No longer viewed by scientists as the cell’s
fixed set of master molecules, genes and DNA are seen as a dynamic
script that is ad-libbed at each stage of development. Rather than an
autonomous predictor of disease, the DNA we inherit interacts
continuously with the environment and functions differently as we age.
What our parents hand down to us is just the beginning. Emphasizing
relatively new understandings of genetic plasticity and epigenetic
inheritance, the authors put into a broad developmental context the role
genes are known to play in disease, behavior, evolution, and cognition.
Rather
than dismissing genetic reductionism out of hand, Krimsky and Gruber
ask why it persists despite opposing scientific evidence, how it
influences attitudes about human behavior, and how it figures in the
politics of research funding.
